


Violence in the Pouring Rain

by gvnseys



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Canon-compliant...ish, M/M, Ronan's a dreamer, Slow Burn, The Gangsey are hallmates, eventual magician!Adam
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 21:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 53,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7284832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gvnseys/pseuds/gvnseys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Did you just…” Ronan squinted his eyes shut and swayed. “Did you just call me your boyfriend?”</p><p>Adam barely had time to register the embarrassment flickering up his neck before Ronan’s hand slipped off the gating and his body slumped forward into Adam’s side, eyes closed, all dead weight.</p><p>**<br/>Or what might have happened if the gang had met in college.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Party

Disengaging himself from a very drunk Tad Curruthers, Adam grabbed a water bottle and made his way out of the kitchen. He knew he was fundamentally averse to alcohol, but this party seemed so far from the reality of his small dusty trailer in his small dusty hometown that it hardly registered as a connection in his mind. Instead, Adam was simply in awe of how this one clear liquid could make a group of twenty-five freshmen seem like old friends. Judging by the bodies leaning half-conscious against one another on the couches, flirting against the walls, tripping over each other trying to find the beer pong ball, you’d never guess they had all been strangers not one week ago.

Adam was fairly certain he was the only sober one, and he was fairly certain that within the last hour a couple more substances had been added into the mix. He didn’t know many of his dorm mates beyond just their faces. From the hall meeting he recognized Henry and a girl who had made eyes at him at the time, Blue. Since the hall meeting he’d become more acquainted with the curious pair of polar opposite best friends: Gansey, who had shown up the first day looking like a golden Ken-doll in boat shoes and a blue polo, and Ronan, who had shown up looking like he'd painted on his black jeans just as he'd painted on the impressive black tattoo that curled out of his loose black tank. The three of them shared an under-division writing class, and Adam quickly learned that Gansey and Ronan were two of the most intelligent students in the class-- although this intelligence was displayed in varying degrees of effort between the two of them. While Gansey was the most social of them, there had blossomed an immediate mutual respect between the three of them.

Looking around the crowded room – when had it filled up with murky smoke? – Adam realized he didn’t actually know the host beyond his reputation. His name was Kavinsky, he was a second-year, and he and his equally intimidating friends threw house parties in their run-down apartment across campus on the weekly. It wasn’t the apartment itself, but rather the state of the contents within it, which lent itself to being run-down. The couch, clearly once an expensive lush black leather wrap-around, was now sagging and ripped; the carpet, a plush cream, was full of stains whose origins Adam didn’t try to contemplate too carefully; the floor was littered with electronics, remotes, speakers. Outside, there stood a shark-like and stark-white Mitsubishi, covered with streaks of dirt and mud. Adam found himself wondering at the difference between his use of money and theirs.

Adam checked his watch—it was 1:13 a.m., and he had planned to wake up in time for breakfast at the Commons before checking on his application at the bookstore and hitting the library to get ahead on his reading. He scanned the room to say goodbye to Gansey and found him on the couch discussing something with great animation, beer sloshing but never spilling, flushed and smiling next to Blue. Equal parts reluctant to interrupt and reluctant to get sucked into another long conversation, Adam turned to head out.

Entirely by chance, as Adam made to close the door gently, he saw a black figure slumped against the wall opposite, crowded by an arm caging the right side of his face and a hand pressing something forcefully into his left palm. His first thought was that this guy looked like he could barely stand, and his second was that he looked like he couldn’t in good sense agree to whatever was being handed to him. His third thought was that it looked a lot like Ronan. Adam wasn’t sure if this was par the course for Ronan’s party habits, but he didn’t like the idea of just leaving him when Gansey was preoccupied.

“Ronan?” Adam placed a tentative hand on the boy’s bare shoulder, shaking gently to get his attention to focus.

The boy draped over Ronan reeked of beer and sweat and Adam thought he was leaning way too close to Ronan for it to pass as appropriate, especially given Ronan’s state. Adam was no prude, but he didn’t know if Ronan was seeing anyone, let alone if he was seeing _this_ creep, let alone if he even liked that kind of attention from boys. It seemed like a bad mix.

The boy leaned back, but only slightly, and tilted his lewd smile at Adam.

“Care to join us, sweetheart?” he drawled. “I’ve got more where this came from,” and he opened Ronan’s palm to show half a dozen bright teal pills.

Adam glanced up at Ronan, whose weight seemed held up in equal measure by the wall and by the boy, his head tilted back and eyes squinted shut against the lights, the bass, the people. A moment’s assessment told Adam that Ronan needed to get out of there, and soon.

“Actually, we were just leaving.” He tacked on a stilted “…but thank you” out of habit, and the guy raised his eyebrow and smirked, his eyes flickering appreciatively down Adam's frame before focusing on his eyes.

“Are you sure? We got way more in the back. Hell, my whole place is filled with it—“ _ah, so this was Kavinsky_ —“Whatever you could possibly dream of, we got it,” he winked at Adam.

Against the wall, Ronan’s head rolled slightly to the left as he let out a groan and his knee began to buckle. Adam grabbed the hand with the pills, shook them out, and slung Ronan’s arm over his shoulder.

“We really should be going, but, um, thank you for the par—" Adam began but Kavinsky’s stance had already turned hostile and his smirk had turned into a sneer.

“You can’t just fucking _take_ him. He fucking _asked_ for these—" he tossed a small handful of the pills at Adam, “and what, you’re acting like you’re his fucking _boyfriend_ or something. He doesn’t even know you, man. Look at him.”

But the brunt of Ronan’s weight had slumped into Adam’s side and his left hand was clutching Adam’s shoulder for dear life. Adam took this as permission to lie his teeth off to get their asses home so he could make sure Ronan was okay, _asap_.

“Actually, he _is_. I mean, w-we … _are_. Um, together, I mean. I am his boyfr….” Adam checked Ronan’s expression, but he seemed pretty much passed out against him. “..iend." He watched with relief as Kavinsky took a step back and pulled his hands off Ronan. "Thanks for the party, man. Maybe another time.” He turned from Kavinsky’s doped-up glare and rearranged Ronan on his shoulders.

Dragging Ronan across the room, he did a quick, embarrassed pat-down of Ronan’s skin-tight pockets for keys or a cell phone. There were no keys, and when Adam slipped the cell phone from Ronan’s back pocket, he realized it was dead. He could grab their room keys from Gansey, as they were roommates, but something told him that Gansey wouldn’t be home to take care of Ronan until much later. Ronan’s breathing had turned more ragged, infused with slightly more groaning, and Adam pulled him the rest of the way out the door. They just had to get across campus back to their hall, and if he could get Ronan up to the second floor, he could stay in Adam’s room. Adam's roommate, Noah, had begrudgingly gone home for the weekend – _“It’s literally the first weekend of college, man, do you know how many parties there are?”_ \-- for his sister’s birthday. 

They barely got out of the apartment complex before Ronan slumped down out of Adam’s arms. Quickly, Adam crouched to stop Ronan’s head from banging into the wrought-iron gating. Almost against his will, it struck Adam how pleasant Ronan’s closely cropped hair felt against his palm—but then Ronan leaned his head forward between his curled up legs and groaned.

“Ronan,” Adam gently reached for Ronan’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Ronan, it’s Adam, from the hall.. From Writing class..” But Adam wasn’t sure Ronan even knew what state he was in, let alone what classes he was enrolled in.

Ronan rolled his head to the side and squinted at Adam. Adam was relieved to finally see his eyes, swirling navy and red-ringed though they were, and even more relieved when he bit out, in a thick slur, “I don’t want the fucking pills man, I said I don’t _wan_ \--Where’s Gansey? Gansey?”

“I know Gansey! Your roommate. He’s inside. Do you want me to get him?” Adam looked down at Ronan nervously; he wasn’t convinced he could get him back to the dorms by himself, but he also wasn’t convinced he should leave Ronan out here while he got Gansey, who may or may not even be in a state to help. “No pills, you’re good, man,” he assured.

At this, Ronan opened his eyes only slightly wider. “Parrish?” and with great heaviness, lifted his hand to the arm that Adam still had on his shoulder. It felt like he tried to squeeze, but Adam barely felt even the weight.

“Do you think you can walk? Back to the dorms?” 

It seemed that the cool air was bringing a modicum of clarity back to Ronan’s mind. He huffed, ran his right hand down his face, and pulled himself up against the gate. Adam reached out his arm to support Ronan, but Ronan tilted his hand up slightly defensively, and Adam stepped back. The last thing he wanted to do was invade his space like Kavinsky had.

“Did you just…” Ronan squinted his eyes shut and swayed. “Did you just call me your _boyfriend_?”

Adam barely had time to register the embarrassment flickering up his neck—

Shame? Foolishness? The ridiculousness of assuming anyone would even believe them as a couple.. Adam’s sandy features, dusty upbringing, taking up as little space as possible and it still being too much, in contrast with Ronan’s piercing features, confidence, his undeniable _presence_ …but that’s assuming he even likes _boys_ , anyway, which is beside the point because it was just a quick lie to get them out of there…would Ronan think Adam was making a move, and be disgusted? Was he any better than Kavinsky if Ronan felt that way? Had he accidentally given Ronan a reputation as gay? But who had even noticed them leave together, and, anyway, wasn't it normal for friends to help one another?

—before Ronan’s hand slipped off the gating and his body slumped forward into Adam’s side, eyes closed, all dead weight.

Adam instinctively tightened his arms around the boy and braced himself against the weight. He closed his eyes and sighed. _Fuck._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys, i'm over on [tumblr](http://qvnseys.tumblr.com/) :)


	2. The Secret

Ronan woke to the familiar tapping of beak against windowpane. _Chainsaw._ Gansey had nearly popped a vein when Ronan cheerfully announced that she'd be accompanying them to college. Back at Monmouth, Chainsaw had formed a habit of terrorizing Gansey, knocking his wireframes off his desk while he slept and pecking at his miniature cardboard replica of Henrietta. It was only with great reticence that Gansey had agreed to let her stay in their dorm, and Ronan was quietly grateful. Besides Gansey, Chainsaw was his most steady companion, a literal extension of himself. He felt bad that he’d left her outside all night.

Finally, he clenched his fingers reflexively, relieved to find them empty for the first time in awhile. He opened his eyes slowly, bracing himself for the morning light. But he was startled by a flash of blue sheets—his were definitely charcoal- and bolted upright, his foggy mind flipping backwards through the last twelve hours. Certain moments came back to him in disjoint snapshots, out of sequence; it was dizzying.

Alcohol had been his surest escape the past few years, but he'd hoped he could outrun his demons if he ever made it all the way to college. If he ever lasted that long. But if the past week was any indication- one nightmare for every night in the dorms- he'd been very wrong. He rubbed his eyes, irritated at himself.

To his left, he saw a sandy boy propped up against the side of the bed, head tilted back, eyes closed. Ronan’s stomach flipped. _Parrish?_

He tried to reconcile his current surroundings with what he knew of the past night, pausing briefly to shoo Chainsaw away from the window. He pieced together a timeline:

Dragging Gansey to Kavinsky’s party. He’d never met the guy, but half the freshmen in his dorm were going to be there. Indulging in a drinking contest with Blue and Gansey. Laughing as Blue destroyed Gansey, panicking slightly as Blue almost destroyed Ronan, too. Finally leaving them to a heated debate about the government funding of wildlife protection. Someone handing him a beer, his stomach turning at the taste. Realizing with urgency that he needed to leave, and soon, before he went down in history as that one freshman who couldn’t handle his liquor. Spotting Gansey, still on the couch with Blue.

And then — _Kavinsky._ Ronan shuddered. He remembered Kavinsky crowding him backwards, a knee shoved between both of Ronan’s, a hand trailing across his collarbone before bracing itself on the wall beside Ronan’s head. Whispering something, something Ronan had thought incredibly important at the time, something he couldn’t recall now.

An argument, someone pulling him away, someone saying—someone saying he was Ronan’s boyfriend?

And then… cool air, and Adam’s blue eyes wide, worried, swirling. Adam, solid against his side, supporting his weight. Adam, his freckles dancing in front of Ronan’s eyes, confused and patient as Ronan pleaded, insistently, “don’t let me sleep, I can’t sleep, you can’t let me sleep…”

And then, nothing. Ronan winced. It really should have been Gansey helping him, if he'd been in such bad shape.

But Kavinsky— what had he _wanted_? Ronan felt heat trickle up the back of his neck, remembering the way Kavinsky'd touched him. He shoved the thought away quickly, focusing on the more important question: what had he tried to tell him? Something licked up at Ronan’s consciousness, a whisper of truth, but he couldn’t grasp onto it, couldn’t remember.

Then there was Adam. He couldn't fathom why Adam had helped him; that was Gansey's area of expertise, cleaning up after him, a habit bred from years of loyalty. He hoped Adam wouldn't fixate on the sleep thing, but also—and Ronan saved this for last, unwrapping it carefully—what Adam told Kavinsky… did that mean… did Adam like boys, then? Ronan almost choked. Had it just been an escape plan?

The second he’d met Adam, he'd automatically regarded him as untouchable, and not just because he’d seen him flirt with Blue. He was just _inaccessible_ , cool, quietly composed, a little over-serious, and he seemed very content with who he was. Ronan was never content with who he was, because he couldn’t even figure out _what_ he was. Or _how_ he was.

He severed that line of thought, frustrating and irrelevant.

 _Get a fucking grip_. He needed a shower, he needed food, he needed to check on Gansey. He eased gently out of the bed and slid into his shoes, grabbing his phone from Adam’s charger. It felt weird to just leave, but he didn’t want to wake him up. He found a stack of Adam’s post its and pulled out a pen before he stopped himself. Wait, was this weird? But it’s not like he was going to send his thanks via _text._

Ronan shook his head. He was being ridiculous. He scratched out a reckless “Thanks –R” and slipped out the door.

***

Adam quickly learned five important things about Ronan, primarily because Ronan lacked a single subtle bone in his body.

For one, he was an impatient, careless student, directing his energy towards only the fields that interested him. It was clear he couldn’t care less about their shared writing class as it was just a required pre-requisite, and Adam struggled to reconcile this with how Ronan was probably the smartest person he knew. As the group sunk into more frequent study habits, he finally caught glimpses of Ronan at his full potential: hunched for hours at a time over Latin grammar, chasing down various translations of old Greek plays just to compare a few specific lines, engrossed in an argument with Gansey over some passage of Euripdes’.

Two, whenever went about doing something thoughtful for one of his friends, he buried it under ten layers of rudeness.

For example, there was one time when Adam’s shift was extended by several hours at the bookstore, and he missed lunch and he knew he’d be missing dinner. When he stepped out for a break at three p.m., debating whether or not it was even worth the time and money to buy a bag of chips, he spotted Ronan, lying across a bench in his usual black jeans and black coat, using a fast-food take-out bag as a pillow. Adam wasn't one to accept gifts from others, but he had to admit that it was made a little easier when Ronan just shoved the food at him and grunted, “Didn’t see you at lunch, Parrish. Thought you were dead in a ditch.”

Three, much to Adam’s chagrin, Ronan refused to let the “boyfriend” thing go. He felt like the constant butt of Ronan’s perpetual jokes, and he didn’t understand why. By now, they were all good friends—was the very idea of dating Adam really that repulsive? That hilarious? He was pretty sure if he'd called himself Noah's boyfriend, Noah wouldn't have fixated on it.

When Gansey chastised Ronan for skipping class, Ronan rolled his eyes, unimpressed. "Parrish, are you really gonna let Dick talk to your boyfriend like that? I'm wounded..."

Gansey scowled. "Am I to understand that you still find it funny that you were so intoxicated that Adam had to drag you home, and the only way he'd accomplished that was by pretending he'd willingly entered into a relationship with you?" He looked exasperated. "Is that really so funny?"

Ronan just laughed, a sharp exhale. "Oh, yes, baby." Adam didn’t understand, but it stung.

Another time, when they saw Kavinsky slinking around near Nino's, Ronan refused to pass up the opportunity. He threw his arm across Adam's shoulders, cuddling in close, and made what Adam assumed was a kissing sound against Adam's left ear. Gansey scolded Ronan ("Really, Lynch, you're being awful. Leave Adam alone.") and Kavinsky watched on, coolly unimpressed. Adam just froze, unused to being touched and unsure if he should tell his friends about his injury.

Four, he was mercurial as hell. He became quick friends with Adam’s roommate, Noah, and around him he was his most hyper, childlike self, the two of them bonding over old scars and skateboards. Aside from that, though, he was generally a whirl of cutting remarks and sarcastic smirks and sleep-deprivation.

Five, Ronan was guarding a secret, and Adam had gotten close to it. The night of Kavinsky's party, Adam had jolted awake before dawn to find Ronan seizing the blankets, shaking, sweating. He'd panicked, grabbing Ronan's hands to wake him. Ronan's hands had been empty, Adam was sure of it, each of their palms fitting smoothly together- but an instant later, something was crammed between Adam's right hand and Ronan's left. It sounded ridiculous, impossible, fundamentally illogical, but Adam knew the irrefutable truth of it. He'd panicked, shoving the object into one of his desk drawers for later inspection before Ronan could fully wake.

Adam still hadn't taken it out.

***

The week leading up to Halloween was referred to across campus as Hell Week, and with good reason. Despite Adam’s best efforts, his midterms and essays had piled up at once and it was clear he wasn’t the only one suffering.

On Wednesday, they met at Nino’s to visit Blue at work, and everyone was burnt out and ready to snap. Ronan had gone from looking surly and exhausted to looking rather dead; Noah’s optimistic chattering and restless energy had faded into a resigned, mute productivity; Blue’s hair and temper were spikier than ever and she messed up their order; Gansey’s wireframes had become a thing of permanence. Adam just wanted sleep.

Finally, they shuffled out. The meal had done nothing to rejuvenate them, and Adam was irritable.

Ahead of him, Ronan was kicking the gravel—probably destroying the soles of his shoes—and Gansey was already speed-walking back to the library. Adam was too focused on watching them to notice when Kavinsky pushed off the wall outside of Nino’s and slid up to his side, whispering something directly into his left ear, his breath hot.

 _Of course it was his left ear_ , Adam thought, _as per fucking usual_. Did he need a sign, or something? Adam shook him off, bristling. “Didn’t catch that, you’ll have to speak up.”

Ronan turned, surprised by the heat in Adam’s voice, and his eyes narrowed in on Kavinsky immediately.

“Is there a fucking problem, Joseph?”

Kavinsky grinned, shrugging. “Nah, Lynch. I was just telling him he’s too fucking pretty for you.”

Just as Adam turned to leave, in no mood for this power play, Kavinsky reached out a hand to ruffle Adam's hair. It was rude gesture, but ultimately harmless- but he approached from the left and Adam couldn’t hear it coming, had no warning.

When Kavinsky’s fingers touched him, Adam flinched, a knee-jerk reaction bred by years of habit. Adam whirled around, but not before he saw Ronan’s expression harden and his fist clench. Ronan headed straight for Kavinsky.

“Easy, babe. _Easy_ ,” Kavinsky sneered, backing away with his arms up, mock defensive. “Damn, Lynch, such a protective boyfriend...”

When Ronan swung, Adam saw it in slow motion. The wind-up, the careful placement of his thumb, the resigned expression.

He also saw Kavinsky duck, laughing, before grabbing Ronan’s arm and twisting it against Ronan’s back, completely unconcerned.

“Like I said, easy.” Kavinsky smirked, locking eyes with Adam over Ronan's struggling shoulder. “I just came by to tell you-” he looked up at Adam, making sure he was listening. His face was so close to Ronan's neck, Adam was sure their skin would touch- “ _I know what you are_.”

Adam watched as Ronan froze, no longer fighting against Kavinsky’s hold, and he could practically see the gears struggling to turn in his mind. Ronan shifted, looking up at Kavinsky, his expression open and confused, a raw nerve. Abruptly, Kavinsky's smug grin fell and his grip loosened.

“Wait— you have no _fucking_ clue, do you? It’s what I was trying to tell you—" but Ronan was already twisting away and shrugging him off, heading for Gansey. Unless Adam was mistaken, a deep flush had crept up the back of Ronan's neck.

Kavinsky just stood there, stunned, before tossing his head back into a sharp humorless laugh. Adam saw Gansey waiting for him, but he was frozen. He felt like he was on the cusp of some important, elusive revelation that might explain Ronan's erratic behavior, his moodiness, the object stashed in Adam's drawer.

“You really are too pretty for him, kid.” Adam swallowed as Kavinsky’s gaze trailed achingly slowly down Adam’s face, lingering on his collar bones for a long, suspended moment before darting back up.

Kavinsky shrugged, made the shape of a gun with his thumb and finger, pointed it straight at Adam, and walked away.

_Bang._

***

“Okay, comrades,” Gansey began, pleasantly, his hands in his pockets and his hair tossing slightly in the wind. “What the hell was that, exactly?”

“It seems thatRonan,” Adam huffed, “has got himself the world's creepiest admirer.”

Ronan barely heard them, though, because he barely heard anything.

Because he felt more awake than he had in months, in _years_ maybe.

Because Kavinsky had shoved two fingers into the front pocket of his jeans, and somehow Ronan knew exactly what he’d left behind. _Whatever you could possibly dream of, we got it_.

Because the knowledge of the thing in his pocket, the implications bubbling to his consciousness, the recollection, finally, of what Kavinsky had whispered into his ear that night—so important, at the time, but lost for so many weeks—was burning a hole straight through to Ronan’s skin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for sticking with me, guys! i'm over on [tumblr](http://qvnseys.tumblr.com/) :)


	3. The Game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's a bit longer! I hereby present drinking games and BMW talks.

Ronan needed a drink. He'd needed one for the last three days, ever since Kavinsky had ambushed him outside of Nino’s and reframed everything he'd always thought was true. _I know what you are._

The initial vertigo had worn off quickly, leaving him with a million questions. Like whether or not Kavinsky was just messing with him, whether or not Kavinsky was like him, whether or not that small teal pill was an average pharmaceutical, what it did if it wasn’t— what it _meant_ if it wasn't. But he didn’t trust Kavinsky, especially not with something this important, this integral to Ronan’s whole existence, so he'd resigned himself to the futility of burning curiosity. A small part of him wondered if Kavinsky's words had simpler implications, if he was just picking apart the "boyfriend" thing yet again. A bigger part of him intuited what they were really about.

Yet there he was, dragged to Kavinsky’s Halloween party by Noah in a cruel twist of fate. Noah had insisted they all go out— _It’s our first Halloween at college, guys, don’t be lame—_ and Ronan figured it at least beat sitting alone in the dorm with Chainsaw. But he hadn’t counted on seeing Adam there, especially not with people other than the four of them. It hadn't occurred to Ronan that Adam had other friends. He hadn't even imagined Adam would have _time_ for other friends.

Seeing Adam there with people _other_ than Ronan, Gansey, Noah, and Blue felt wrong, like seeing a small glimpse of how life could have been if they were strangers, and Ronan hated it.

He also hated how familiar he was with certain things about Adam, like how the rip in those faded blue jeans was from falling off Noah’s skateboard—okay, from being pushed off. By Ronan. Or how the black watch on Adam’s wrist had stopped working a month ago, and Ronan had all but forced Adam to leave it with him, claiming he “was good with that shit.” After a frustrating week of struggling- he didn't exactly know how to control his dreams- he'd replaced the battery with one that would never die. It was a strange imbalance to know someone so well and feel unknown in return.

But then there was the blatant shock at how wrong he’d been when he’d assumed Adam was only interested in girls. Because there he was, talking amiably with a very touchy Tad, his shoulders squared elegantly and his mouth in a careful smile. Ronan thought back on all those times he'd brought up the “boyfriend” thing, egging Adam on, waiting for Adam to either snap at him or return the joke… He could hardly fault somebody for their preferences, but clearly it was just Ronan that Adam didn’t like.

Ronan _really_ needed a drink, but he hadn’t had one since Kavinsky’s first party almost two months ago. Because he’d seen the look on Adam’s face when he’d told everyone he didn’t like alcohol, and although he still didn’t know the reasoning for that look, he’d hated it.

So there he was, in Kavinsky’s shitty apartment, stone-cold sober, while the guy he’d thought was straight was happily fawned over by another guy.

Fucking perfect.

***

Adam had made a very, very big mistake, and he wasn’t sure how to fix it. He’d actually made _several_ big mistakes, all within the last twenty-four hours, all leading up to this exact moment, face-to-face with Kavinsky in the center of a drunken crowd, desperately trying to control his temper. Because his temper, once unleashed, was an ugly thing, an inbred part of him he hadn’t yet learnt to control.

His first mistake had been coming here. With midterm exams behind him and no homework, Adam had given himself two blissful days of freedom for menial things like re-organizing his notes, getting his laundry done, and finally getting around to seeing his coworkers outside of work. Tonight had simply been an attempt to balance out his social life a little, but what he hadn't realized was that he'd agreed to come _here._ But there Adam was, in Kavinsky's apartment, surrounded by his coworkers, completely out of his element. The throbbing bass, the suffocating smoke, the cacophony of drunken laughter and cheering—he wished he hadn't come, or he wished he'd come with his friends.

His second mistake was Tad. He should have remembered to keep his distance once Tad began drinking; now, he kept tossing an arm across Adam’s shoulders, leaning on him, talking right in his deaf ear. Adam didn’t like the contact, but he wasn’t sure how to extricate himself without being too rude.

His third mistake was watching Ronan. Watching as Ronan irritably waved his water bottle at a girl who offered him a drink, or tossed out a playful elbow to shove Blue, or bit back a smirk at whatever Noah whispered in his ear. It was a mistake because lately something was beginning to dawn on Adam: a slow, strange realization that despite all their time spent together, he really didn't know Ronan at all. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it, and he wasn't quite sure whose fault it was.

His fourth mistake had been letting Kavinsky rope him into this. As a rule he was fundamentally opposed to alcohol, and he’d never once felt the urge to drink. But he’d wanted to wipe that nasty, smug grin off Kavinsky’s face; he’d been so condescending, so arrogant, and Adam refused to let him have the upper hand. He was never one to back down from a challenge.

***

“Cheer up, sweetheart. If you don’t wanna drink, you can just kiss your boyfriend each time instead.” Kavinsky said this to Adam, but his eyes were locked on Ronan’s, smirking. “Alright, gather round, assholes. We’re gonna play a fucking game. _Never have I ever._ You all know this shit—but in my house, every time we knock you down, you take a shot. And _every_ turn is _my_ turn.”

The "assholes" in question were a very drunk Tad, a tipsy Henry, a wary Noah, a hostile Ronan, a sober Gansey and Blue, and Kavinsky’s roommates. Prokopenko looked stoned out of his mind, Jiang was serious in the corner, and Skov and Swan were taking turns flicking a lighter across a plant, its burnt leaves crumpling.

“Alright alright. The first one’s worth two shots. Never have I ever been at a party and _not_ had a fucking drink.”

Henry and Blue took the shot, but Gansey refused; he'd driven. Noah sighed and made a cheers gesture at Adam, and Adam coughed through the burn.  _One._

“You too, Lynch. And I said _two_ shots. Don’t be a bitch.” Kavinsky sloppily refilled everyone's glasses, watching as they tossed them back before shoving the bottle at Ronan. _Two._

“I drove, dick. I’m not here to drink." Ronan's voice was ice as he dropped the bottle onto the counter.

Kavinsky rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. Next. Never have I ever… worked for minimum wage.”

He looked downright triumphant, but Blue just shrugged, clearly unashamed. She and Adam both took the shot. _Three._

"Yeah, good. Next— never have I ever…" He spit out the rest, directly at Adam, "lived in a fucking trailer park.”

Heat flashed down Adam’s spine. _How?_ It was impossible for Kavinsky to know this; _no one_ here knew this. Adam felt Gansey's eyes on him, wide with some emotion, but refused to meet them lest that emotion was pity. His left hand clenched into a tight fist, nails biting against palm, but he took the shot. _Four._

Kavinsy yelped, pleased. “Next. Never have I ever…swapped saliva with a fucking _dude_.”

All of Kavinsky's roommates drank to this one, as did Tad, but Adam was surprised to note that Blue didn't. The very tips of Gansey's ears were faintly pink as he watched Blue, and Ronan's gaze kept flickering over to Adam and away, like he was trying to figure something out. Noah looked profoundly amused.

“Really, Parrish? Never? Shit, who am I fucking kidding—" Kavinsky snorted, tipping the bottle back and chugging for a long moment. “Alright, let’s dial it back, yeah? Something easy. Never have I ever…said I was someone’s boyfriend when I wasn’t.”

Adam’s eyes darted to Ronan’s, but Ronan’s lethal glare was trained on Kavinsky. Adam took the shot, irritated, and his stomach protested. _Five._

It was finally dawning on Adam that this whole thing was meant for no one but himself. Blue huffed, apparently catching on as well; she'd heard the "boyfriend" story enough times from Ronan’s endless jokes. Adam saw Henry grab a beer before slipping away, clearly bored, and Blue and Gansey followed. Inexplicably, Ronan and Noah stayed. _How much longer could this go?_

“Well! Now that it's thinned out a bit, never have I ever… _wanted_ to be the boyfriend of someone who I’d said I was his boyfriend when I wasn—wait, wait, that’s too fucking complicated.” Kavinsky staggered backwards, laughing, whiskey sloshing onto the counter. “You get my drift, though, right babe?” His eyes flicked pointedly from Adam to Ronan. “Yeah?”

Prokopenko threw a steadying arm against Kavinsky’s side but Kavinsky just shrugged him off, irritated. He finally regained balance just in time to see Ronan’s fist before it caught him across the bridge of his nose. Kavinsky rocked backwards from the impact, choking on laughter.

What followed were a few minutes of confusion, bodies swirling. Noah's cool hands were tugging Adam out of the room, and it seemed that two of Kavinsky’s roommates rushed at Ronan, crowding him back against the refrigerator. Before Ronan had time to defend himself, though, Kavinsky was shoving his boys away, livid and uncoordinated, his discarded bottle spilling across the counter and onto the floor.

It was then that Adam realized, surprised, that his head felt pleasantly light, his cheeks a little tingly and warm. _This stuff works fast._ He stood there, watching the smoke plume upwards from the poor plant—he was pretty sure it was a pothos— a little entranced by the way his brain was beginning to slow down while the rest of the world sped up.

Then there was a breath, cool against the right side of his neck, and firm fingers around his wrist.

“Come on, Parrish. I drove.”

***

Ronan was too keyed-up to head back to the dorms just yet, the adrenaline of an almost-fight still pulsing, but he didn’t know where else to take Adam. What he wanted was to drive, to lose himself in the staccato of mile signs and lane lines. He wasn’t sure what had possessed Adam to drink or why Kavinsky was so intent on screwing with him, but he just added those to his growing list of questions.

He glanced at Adam: eyes closed, head tilted back, lazy closed smile, fingers gently drumming the beat of Ronan’s music. He bit back a smirk, remembering Adam’s usual response—“this music’s shit, Lynch, it sounds like robots having sex. And that’s not a good thing, loser.”

He figured Adam would be fine with just riding along for a bit.

“Eyes on the road, Lynch.” Adam’s voice was lazy, slow, and…was that an _accent_?

Ronan snorted. “Just checking you weren’t passed out dead, man. Why’d you drink so fucking much?”

"Why d'you fight so much?"

"Why, man, you wanna learn how to throw a punch?"

Adam just sighed, rolling his head to squint at Ronan through one eye. “Do you think Noah s’okay?”

"Oh, yeah. You think I'd strand his skinny ass there? I made sure he'd get a ride back with Gansey."

Adam nodded, relieved, but his eyebrows were still furrowed. Ronan didn't know if it was from the alcohol— he'd definitely been there himself—or from whatever thought had knotted itself in Adam's mind.

"How long've you known Gansey?" Adam finally asked.

“How long’ve you known Tad?” Ronan knew these were two different questions, knew he was being unfair. But he didn’t understand how Adam could just _date_ someone when he barely knew them. They'd all only met a few weeks ago, and it seemed… wrong, somehow.

“Why, Lynch, you jealous?”

“Yeah, Parrish. _That’s_ what I am.” Ronan scoffed, aiming for sarcastic.

Adam sighed again, leaning back against the headrest before closing his eyes.

“I was supposed to be out with my coworkers, but…” Adam gestured vaguely at the dashboard before trailing off.

That really didn’t clarify anything but Ronan really didn't want to hear about Tad, anyway. Adam’s question about Gansey had brought back memories of Monmouth, and Ronan was abruptly desperate to share that part of his past. It was just about the best he had to offer.

“Well, uh—Gansey and I met sophomore year, when he transferred to my school, Aglionby. Private, all boys, uniforms, the total prep package. He was obsessed at the time with finding things—like, old things.” Ronan scrubbed a hand down the back of his head, frustrated at his own inadequacy with words. “Like tombs and sacred sites, and the whole reason he even moved to our town, Henrietta, was to find an old Welsh king—”

“A _king_?” Adam cut him off, laughing, and Ronan realized he was unfamiliar with the sound.

“Yeah, Parrish, a king. And he wasn’t content to just live at the dorms like any other normal sixteen year-old, so he bought an entire fucking factory. Monmouth Manufacturing—”

“You’re messing with me. Not even _Gansey—”_

“I swear. It was a mess, too. I, uh…” He considered how much to share, deciding to skip a few details. “I moved in with him a few months later. It was crazy, man, our refrigerator was in the fucking _bathroom._ ”

Ronan forced himself not to smile as Adam fully lost his shit, erupting into a fresh peel of laughter. “No. You’re messing with me. You’re completely screwing with me.”

“I’m serious, man. I never lie.”

At this, Adam stopped laughing. He straightened up in his seat, eyes wide and intense. “But this is really all just Gansey. What's something true about you?”

Ronan froze. The question felt way too intimate here, in his father's BMW, the black asphalt bending up into the black sky. He spit out the first thing that came to mind.

“I have a pet raven.”

Adam didn’t even laugh this time. “No you do not, man.”

“You’ve literally seen the cage—”

“It’s always empty!”

“You don’t believe me? I’m wounded, Parrish.”

Adam just smiled, relaxing back again.

“I dunno _what_ to believe. I feel like I’m sleeping.” He spread his hands out in front of his face, flexing his fingers carefully. “Like this is all a big dream. Maybe you’re just part of it.” He hummed, closing his eyes. “A dream thing.”

Ronan bit out a laugh, a sharp humorless exhale. It was possible Adam was drunker than he'd realized. “Sure, dude.”

“I do wanna meet your bird, though.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, Ronan shoved the gear into park and tossed a package of fries at Adam, bracing himself for an argument about money and the cost of things. Adam had never explicitly stated it, but Ronan had a feeling he slaved away at the bookstore for more than just pocket change. In light of Kavinsky's dig about trailer parks, it seemed Ronan was on the right track.

“Eat, man, you’ll feel a lot better.”

“I really, truly, honestly feel fine right now.” Adam lingered carefully over every vowel, and Ronan hated how pleasant it sounded. “Isn’t that weird?”

“Yeah, dipshit. It’s called being drunk.”

“Sorry, I forgot that was your area of expertise.” Adam took one single fry and bit off a quarter of it, chewing slowly, and Ronan marveled at how even when he was _drunk_ he treated each bite like a gift. He hated it; he wanted Adam to toss the whole package back in one fell swoop. He'd buy him ten more.

For once, Ronan passed up the opportunity for a fight. Instead, he asked, “I thought you don’t drink?”

“I don’t. Do you wanna know something?” Adam said this serious, slow, before rushing out the next part with a harsh laugh. “I can’t hear out of my left ear. Can you even believe that? I used to, but now it’s just _nothing._ There’s just nothing there.”

He snapped his fingers almost violently, an inch from his left ear, and Ronan winced. He wanted to grab those fingers, settle them down, soothe them out. He hated it.

He also hated the implication behind Adam’s “I used to,” but he didn’t want to pry for information. Not when Adam was like this.

Ronan just cleared his throat. “Yeah, I kind of figured as much.”

“What—how?”

“Uh, I don’t know… I just—there was that day at Nino’s, when I kind of attacked you like an obnoxious shit? Then I noticed that when we’re all talking, or if we’re all in Gansey’s car, you kind of tilt your head a certain way…” Ronan fiddled with his bracelets, out of words and irritated.

For several long moments, Adam just looked at him. Finally Ronan shoved a fry at Adam’s face.

***

By the time Ronan managed to unlock Adam’s dorm room, Adam was well on his way to sleep. Ronan was a little surprised that Noah still hadn't come back, but he knew Gansey would get him home safely. He nudged Adam over to his bed, rolling his eyes as Adam flopped dramatically down before curling up around his blankets. He didn’t want to be invasive, but he knew Adam would be upset to find dirt and scuff marks across his bedding. He pulled Adam’s sneakers off, careful not to touch him.

“You got Advil, Parrish? For tomorrow. And water?”

Adam just groaned, barely conscious. “Desk drawer. Closest.”

Ronan went for the water first, placing it in Adam’s line of sight on the desk before flipping through the first drawer, then the second. He finally found the Advil, and beside it was a small yellow square. Ronan squinted at it in the near-dark for a moment before realizing:

“Thanks –R.”

He’d _kept_ it? Ronan hazarded a glance at Adam, but he looked pretty much passed out. Maybe he was just a compulsive hoarder.

Closing the drawer slowly, careful not to make too much noise, Ronan froze when something loose skidded forward—

Something _very_ familiar, something he’d only ever seen at home in Singer’s Falls or clutched painfully in his own hands upon waking. Something that was undeniably a dream thing, something Adam definitely shouldn’t have.

Ronan snatched it up, panicking, before crouching over Adam and shaking his shoulder, a little rougher than he’d intended.

“Parrish?” His voice was a little desperate, and he hated it. “ _Adam._ Wake up.”

But Adam just lifted his hand, slow and heavy, to the arm grabbing his shoulder. His eyes were still closed, barely-awake, but his thumb caught under Ronan’s wristbands, accidentally finding the ridges hidden there. Ronan tensed, bracing to pull away.

“So many scars,” Adam hummed, soothing his thumb back and forth across the sensitive skin before slowing to a still, his breath deep and even.

Ronan's wrist burned. Every single cell in his body was whirling, on fire, aching to explode. He actually felt dizzy.

Maybe all this really _was_ a dream. He wasn’t so sure where the lines were anymore.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm over on [tumblr](http://qvnseys.tumblr.com/) :)


	4. The Dream

Adam loved libraries, and his university’s was no exception. Back at home, he’d spent the hours between school and work tucked away in the modest library near campus, preferring to study in the quiet stacks of books rather than in his cramped bedroom. Maybe it was just habit, now, but he still took comfort in the endless rows of dark wooden desks and golden lamps.

After last night, he'd decided he preferred his usual safe routines to spontaneous plans. So instead of taking the day off like he'd planned, he came to the library and immersed himself in next week’s readings. Adam Parrish was not the sort to be dragged into a bad situation against his better judgment, and he certainly wasn’t the type to toss aside his principles just to prove somebody wrong. Last night had been an anomaly. Something had gotten under his skin—rather, something had been under his skin for awhile now, a slow-growing irritation that had become increasingly hard to ignore over the last few weeks, and it left him with little patience for Kavinsky.

By now, Adam had intuited that there was something that tied Kavinsky to the dozens of questions Adam had about Ronan. He just couldn't understand what Kavinsky wanted or what it had to do with him. He wasn't sure if Kavinsky's attack last night was personal or if he was just caught in the crossfire, but he had no interest in those games.

The only good thing from last night was the small glimpse underneath Ronan's combative façade. Everything about his life with Gansey seemed like magic, from their abandoned factory to their buried king. Between his pet raven and sleep-manifested objects, Ronan was straddling the fine line that separated the unfathomable from the impossible, and Adam was suddenly anxious to know him, to understand him.

Adam sighed and checked his watch. _3:02p.m._ In just a couple hours, he’d be at Commons with everyone. He got back to work.

***

Adam was in a forest. The late-afternoon sunshine poured through the thick foliage, soaking the fallen logs and moss-covered dirt with warm golden light. The little murmuring creek winding its way around ancient grey stones, the vines crawling up and over hollowed trunks wide as cars, the towering trees—all were alive and magical, and Adam loved every bit of it. To his left, he recognized their voices before he saw them: Noah and Blue’s laughter, Gansey’s delighted sigh, and—

Adam felt pressure on his right shoulder, and he was wrenched from his dream, shoving away from the library desk before he even had time to process the hand on his jacket and the figure peering down at him.

“Jesus Christ, Parrish.” The figure was Ronan, and he pulled out a chair and flung himself down across the table from where Adam’s books were laid out. As usual, he did nothing half-way. “Almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Ronan?” Adam blinked, trying to clear the last wisps of sleep from his brain. “Wait— _I_ almost gave _you_ a heart attack? Are you serious?”

“Yeah, man. You assault everyone when you wake up, or just me?” Ronan sneered cheerily, but Adam just stared at him, trying to get his bearings.

“I thought you went home today?” One thing Adam knew about Ronan with certainty was that every Sunday, without fail, he made the drive back home to meet his brothers for church.

Ronan let out something between a scoff and laugh. He pushed Adam’s left wrist up to Adam’s eyes; the face on his watch read 7:03 p.m., which meant he'd missed dinner at Commons. Finally he noticed that the floor-to-ceiling windows on the other side of the study room showed a dark, faintly blue sky streaked with fuschia and purple. _How long had he been asleep?_

“Yeah, I did. Ten hours ago. And then I came back. Noah's been looking for you, you know.” Ronan shot Adam an accusatory glare, but it softened slightly when he heard Adam's stomach growl. Like magic, Ronan procured a greasy brown bag and tossed it on the table.

“Oh, no. You’ve got to be kidding me. Stop buying me food.” Adam pushed the bag back towards Ronan and crossed his arms, indignant.

With a huff, Ronan flipped the bag over, scattering four enormous burgers and two trays of fries. From the seat next to him, Ronan pulled out a coffee and shoved it at Adam.

“Normal people say thanks, loser. Anyway, it wasn’t me. Gansey sent me to find you.” Adam was surprised—Gansey could have come himself, if he’d been worried. Ronan cut through his thoughts. “What are you even _doing_ here? I swear you’re the only one in this whole building, man. It’s fucking creepy.”

Adam rolled his eyes. That was illogical; every floor of the library had a few technicians and staffers. But he understood what Ronan meant. It was a little unsettling to realize he’d fallen asleep here, and it would have been more than a little eerie to wake up here alone after sunset. He felt abruptly grateful for Ronan’s presence.

Ronan tossed Adam a burger before unwrapping one for himself and stuffing some fries inside.

"You didn't eat dinner at Commons?" Adam asked.

"Oh, I did." Ronan swallowed audibly and flashed an enormous smile. "This is just round two."

Adam forced himself not to roll his eyes again. When Ronan went for another handful of fries, Adam noticed the bruises on Ronan's right knuckles and his mind flicked back to Kavinsky.

"So, about last night." Adam winced; the words sounded so cliché, sounded like they meant more than just a ride home. Ronan just quirked an eyebrow and let him continue. "Thanks for the ride. And the food, too."

Ronan nodded around a mouthful of burger, verbose as usual.

Adam tried again, "And, uh— it was pretty fun to see Kavinsky get decked."

Ronan laughed but it came out as a choked cough. Through his bite of food, he said, "Last night you didn’t seem so impressed.”

"Do you know how to _chew_ , Lynch? Usually it entails a closed mouth.” Adam watched as Ronan smirked without venom, and he bit back a returning smile of his own. _Focus_. “Anyway, I'm opposed to fighting on principle. Still think Kavinsky deserved it."

Ronan's eyes flicked up to Adam's and just stared for a long moment, and Adam felt uncomfortably scrutinized. He was about to try to redirect the conversation one last time before Ronan finally spoke.

"Yeah, well. It was about time. After two months he really needed to get over the fucking 'boyfriend' thing." Ronan's eyes were still locked on Adam's. "Right?"

"Oh, uh, yeah-"

"Because it's fucked up to Tad."

Adam actually choked on the fry he'd been nibbling, and once he'd cleared his windpipes, laughter rushed out.

" _Tad?_ Oh my God." Suddenly everything leading to this exact moment, being glared down by Ronan in an empty library after yet another night at Kavinsky's, seemed impossibly funny.

"The hell, Parrish? You still drunk?" Ronan’s tone was cutting, as always, but he looked uncomfortable, hunched slightly and picking at his bracelets.

"Sorry, it's just—" Adam cleared his throat and tried to reign himself in. "That is not a thing."

"Because he's a guy?"

"Oh, uh- I don't even _know_ him." Adam knew it was a non-answer, but Ronan could take from it what he wanted.

To Adam's relief, Ronan just nodded once and shoved the rest of his burger in his mouth before pulling Adam's notebook across the table and scanning the page.

“Latin?” Ronan asked, and Adam nodded. “You missed this one. And that one, number seventeen.”

“Thanks, Einstein, but I think I got it.” Adam grabbed for his notebook, but Ronan held it out of reach.

“Wait—you do know I’m a Latin minor, right?” Adam just stared. Ronan was a Classics major so Adam wasn’t surprised, but he could add that to the growing list of things he hadn’t known about Ronan Lynch. He placed it just above “refrigerator in the bathroom” and a few spaces below “creates things out of thin air while sleeping.” Someday, Adam would have the courage to ask him about the object hiding in his desk.

Ronan scribbled something on the page in pencil before looking back up at Adam. “Christ, you really don’t know me at all. I’m heartbroken.”

“Yeah, yeah. Cuz you’re such an _expert_ on me.” The second Adam said it, his stomach did a curious flip, like he'd crossed out into dangerous waters. It felt like a dare. He realized maybe he wouldn't mind so much if Ronan knew him.

When Adam finally looked up, Ronan was just smirking at him, his blue eyes inscrutable.

“Who knows, Parrish? Maybe I am.” Without breaking eye contact, he tossed the notebook back across the table with a satisfying _thwack._

Something warm and strange shot through Adam, and he refused to look away.

***

“You know you’re really pretty, right?”

Adam just laughed, the sound escaping him easily. It was already nearing midnight, but his afternoon spent sleeping at the library had left him wide awake. He was sitting on the carpet, his head leaning back beside Blue’s legs as they dangled off the edge of his bed, and he nudged her calf with his shoulder.

“What does that even _mean_?” He shook his head, remembering the last time he’d heard that. _You really are too pretty for him, kid._ “But thank you. You’re really pretty too.”

Blue kicked him, a playful gesture. “Pshaw.”

It was true; Blue was pretty in a way that had initially stabbed at Adam. After they’d both been tugged into Gansey’s orbit and as he’d gotten to know her, his attraction had morphed into friendship and admiration. Like Gansey, she had about a dozen traits Adam wished he could find within himself.

“Am _I_ really pretty?” On the other side of the room, Noah was sprawled across his bed, bouncing M &M’s off the wall and trying to catch them with his mouth.

“Definitely,” Blue said, and Noah beamed. She ran her fingers absentmindedly through Adam’s hair, and he couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched him so comfortably, so easily. He felt a little starved for it most days. “And what it _means_ , Adam, is that I saw a million girls’ hearts break when Tad was all over you last night, and a million more when Kavinsky implied you and Ronan were a thing.”

Adam made a noise of protest, but Noah cut him off.

“Dude! That guy looks like he wants to devour Ronan.” Noah rolled over, laughing. “I don’t get it.”

Blue shuddered, interrupting Adam before he could respond. “Yeah, it’s gross. But, you have to admit—very reluctantly—that Ronan is also a good-looking guy. I mean, if you can get past his asshole moods.”

Blue scowled, but Adam knew better. When push came to shove, they were far too similar to actually dislike one another.

Noah became serious, thoughtful. “Yeah, he really does work the angst in his favor, doesn’t he?”

“Yes! And those _jeans_ , I swear he paints them on,” she quirked an eyebrow, delighted to have someone to conspire with. “And the tattoo’s a nice touch.”

“Careful, Blue. What would Gansey think?” Adam was trying to redirect traffic, more than a little uncomfortable with this line of conversation.

Whatever Noah had been pondering shattered, “Pew pew, man. Shots fired!” He shot an M&M at Adam but missed, and Blue caught it. “Speaking of, you should have seen Gansey’s face when you didn’t take the shot for having kissed a guy before.”

Now it was Blue’s ears that were faintly pink. “What? It’s not like it’s a big deal. I just—your first kiss is a lot of pressure, so… It just hasn’t happened, okay?”

Noah was across the room in a second, bouncing onto Adam’s bed beside Blue. Adam had to duck to avoid a kick to the face.

“I could take care of that! Then, once it’s out of the way, you won’t feel so much stress about it,” Noah said this seriously, as though it made total sense. As though he wasn't proposing the most ludicrous thing Adam had ever heard, to casually kiss a friend just so she could kiss someone else.

“What? No, you guys—you know I’m still in the room, right?” Adam turned, preparing bolt out the door if he had to.

It was deadly silent for half a second before Adam was met with an explosion of laughter behind him.

“Oh my _god_ , Noah, no! Go away.” Noah just rolled off the bed, shrugging, a grin splitting his face in two. Blue chucked a pillow at him.

"Alright, alright. Offer still stands, though!" Noah waggled his eyebrows, but the effect was more awkwardly endearing than seductive. "Anyway! So, Adam. You and Tad?"

Adam groaned. "God, no."

"You and Ronan, then?" Blue asked, smirking.

He knew she was joking, but Adam felt heat trickle up the back of his neck. "God, no, not after what you've said about him. I know how possessive you are about your men, Sargent."

Noah flopped on his bed, laughing, and Blue scowled, kicking Adam a little less playfully this time.

It was only after Blue had left and Adam was straightening up his side of the room that he realized his mistake. He'd missed it this morning, but now it felt blindingly obvious: his bottle of Advil, standing directly behind his alarm clock on his desk. His bottle of Advil, taken from his desk drawer by Ronan.

Mechanically, he opened the drawer to put the Advil away, already knowing what he'd find. The strange object was gone, and Ronan had taken it.

Adam's stomach dropped.

***

Ronan was at the Barns. The late-afternoon sunshine poured through the kitchen windows, soaking the front rooms with warm golden light. The wooden cabinets, the wood-paned floors, the towering bookshelves—all looked lit from within, dotted with homey clutter and a million memories, and Ronan loved every bit of it. He could hear Matthew outside, laughing as Declan tackled him to the ground, and the sound tugged at something in his chest.

He saw his mother, curled in her throne in the living room, eyes closed, face relaxed in sleep. On afternoons like this the whole world, the whole _universe_ , stretched out from his fingertips, his for the taking, his for creating. The only thing that could make this better would be if his father came home—but then Ronan heard it, heard tires on the gravel outside, the hum of the beautiful charcoal BMW, his father’s booming voice, Matthew’s delighted squeal. And then his father was at the doorstep, and Ronan was already bursting to tell him about his latest dream. The key knocked against the lock, the door flew open, one boot stepped over the threshold, and then—

And then Ronan was pitching forward, slow and disorienting, and then he was falling. The seconds slowed down to minutes, to years, and he was scrambling to find purchase on something, anything in the darkness, but everything he got his hands on just ripped at his skin. He begged to be jolted awake, desperate to feel that seize in his muscles as he finally was tossed into consciousness.

Finally, he saw something below him, saw asphalt and lane lines rapidly rising up to meet him, and he knew this wasn’t a dream; he knew with blinding clarity that this was _real_ , this was real and he was going to die, he was going to—

And then Ronan was standing. No, he was staggering, he was crumpling forward, his own weight unbearable, and then there was a body, warm against his chest, stopping the inevitable fall, sandy freckles and blue eyes swirling into focus.

Those eyes rapidly morphing into confusion, no, terror, no, revulsion, and then Ronan was alone, except for a small presence at the edge of the tree line, big eyes and hooves, but he could barely register her because his entire world was blood, hot and endless, his jeans soaked with it, his forearms unrecognizable, his pulse steadily slowing, and then –

Ronan surged forward, ripping sweaty sheets with him as he went.

Gansey had forgotten to close the curtains before he’d fallen sleep at his desk, and the dull moonlight illuminated every line of clutter, casting harsh shadows across the walls and floor. Ronan lay there for a second, perfectly still, taking stock of his body; his pulse was galloping, he was covered in blood, but his wrists were intact. He was intact.

Clutched desperately in his fingers was a dream thing, small but ugly and cruel. To anyone else, it would appear to be a hard, plastic facsimile of a rotten black rose. To Ronan, who knew the dream from which this was wrenched, this was death manifested, and his palm was laced with puncture wounds, a charred thorn stuck in each.

The thorns hurt, but Ronan hurt more. The dream meant nothing, the dream wasn’t real, the dream was a collection of memories and emotions stitched together, triggered by his day spent in Henrietta. But he was abruptly tired of being Ronan Lynch, tired of being whatever it was he _was_ , tired of being it alone.

A few years ago, after the one time it had really mattered, Gansey had actually gotten down on his knees and begged Ronan to come to him the next time his dreams were ever too much. Even in his anesthetic haze, Ronan had scoffed derisively— _the fuck, man? You really think_ now _is a good time to propose?—_ and been very careful to promise no such thing, but secretly the gesture had meant everything.

But now Gansey sat only a few feet away, slumped forward over his fat leather notebook, and Ronan thought the distance could have been a thousand miles. At the exact moment he had that thought, he remembered another.

_I know what you are._

Ronan flung himself from bed, careful not to knock anything over lest he wake Gansey, and shoved his hand into Chainsaw’s cage, finding the small Altoids tin within. He brought it back with him to bed and slowly opened the metal lid.

Inside was one small teal pill, taken from the front pocket of Wednesday’s jeans, taken from Kavinsky’s fingers, taken from… Kavinsky’s dreams?

Ronan wasn’t sure, but he was willing to make the bet. He inspected the pill, turning it over and over in his fingers. It was stamped with one arrogant _K_ , but aside from that it was blank. He stared at it for several minutes, weighing his options, the risk, how few things he had to lose. His mind flickered from Matthew to Noah and finally, although he hated it, to Adam.

He took one last glance at Gansey, fully entrenched in the kind of deep sleep that so often evaded the both of them. He looked away.

He made a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!!


	5. The Mistake

Trouble wasn’t often a difficult thing to find around a college campus, but Sunday nights were about as tame as they came. Luckily for Ronan, he was more than experienced with chasing trouble down. It came in any number of forms, from drinking to speeding to fighting, and tonight he wasn’t picky.

His first step was getting the hell out of his room. There was something intensely claustrophobic about having an internal crisis in a closed, dark space with Gansey asleep not five feet from him, unreachable and unaware. He was itching for violence, and back at the dorm it felt like he couldn’t even breathe.

On the way out the hall, he paused on the second floor landing and considered his options. He could call Adam, wake him up, and ask him to come out. He could drown out his own demons with questions about Adam’s past: his family, his hometown, his high school, his injured ear. Or he could uncurl his palms, show Adam his wounds, explain how he got them, and pray that Adam wouldn't run.

Instead, he kept walking. How do you find the exact words to explain a nightmare, to make another person understand?

He made it to his BMW mechanically, without conscious decision, but the shock of pedals under his feet and a gear shift in his hand pulled him the rest of the way into reality. He knew what he wanted.

***

Adam’s alarm read 2:37 a.m.. He wasn’t immediately sure of what woke him, but this was no slow-fade into consciousness. In one instant, he was asleep, dreaming; in the next he was fully awake, his adrenaline pulsing. He tried to calculate, working backwards, and realized he'd barely fallen asleep an hour ago. It felt like he'd been sleeping for ages; it felt like he hadn't slept at all. Adam realized he finally understood exactly what the word _disoriented_ entailed. He couldn’t find his bearings.

Finally he made sense of the repetitive sound: his old flip phone was scrambling across his desk. He took a strange moment to muse at how the vibrate setting was almost _more_ violent than a simple ringtone would have been.

From across the room, he heard an eerily clear voice.

“You should pick it up,” said Noah.

Adam didn’t understand, but he picked it up. “Hello?”

“Adam.” It took him only a second to recognize Gansey’s voice on the line, a confusing blend of both relief and hopelessness. “You don't have Ronan, do you?"

It took him just one second more to recognize the implication of what Gansey was asking him, and blind panic flooded him. If Gansey was looking for Ronan, and he wasn’t with Adam and Noah, then he was gone. At 2:37a.m.

“Gansey? What’s happened?”

“Can you just come up?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we’re coming.”

Hearing this, Noah rolled out of bed and tossed on a jacket and shoes. He motioned for Adam to do the same.

***

The interesting thing about never lying was that it didn’t necessarily make you an honest person. Or did it? Ronan couldn’t decide. He was painfully honest with himself, he demanded honesty from others, and he would never back down from extending the same courtesy to someone else. He just wasn’t sure whose fault it was when the right questions weren’t being asked.

For example, if Gansey had ever asked him, “You don’t still street race, do you?” Ronan would have told the truth, regardless of the consequences. If Adam had ever asked him, “How does Kavinsky really know you?” Ronan would have told the truth, regardless of how Adam looked at him. These were easy questions, too, with easy answers. Because the two were linked.

Because while it was true that he'd met Kavinsky at the first party, he probably could have slipped back off his radar after that night. But two days later, Ronan had stormed out of the dorms, unable to sleep. He’d grabbed his keys, walked unthinkingly to his car, and only come alive at the sound of his engine turning over, a lot like tonight. And when he’d headed a few miles away from campus, trouble had found him.

***

Adam’s pulse galloped through his chest on the short run up to Gansey’s room, but it stopped dead when he crossed the threshold. He hadn’t been in there many times, as the group favored meeting in the study lounges over cramming into one of their dorm rooms, and it was always a shock to see Gansey’s gloriously scholastic side—walls covered with maps, towers of old books, a large ancient analog clock—contrast with Ronan’s sharper modern side, completely devoid of personal belongings—just speakers, mp3 players, a sleek computer.

But this wasn’t what stopped Adam so abruptly in the threshold that Noah actually rammed into him. It was Ronan’s bed, and when Adam saw it, he took a step back, his heart sinking, his mind slowing down. His entire reality was eclipsed by the fact that Ronan was brutally maimed, Ronan was dying. He’d seen him barely six hours earlier, and he couldn't understand.

“Is that… blood?” Noah’s voice trembled, and he sucked in an inhale. “That’s a lot of it.”

Finally Adam looked at Gansey, and what he saw was unnerving. Gansey, always the competent, controlled, collected parental figure, was rapidly breaking down in front of them. He had a tuft of hair clenched in his left fingers and his right hand gripped a phone.

“I don’t understand. I was only asleep for forty-five minutes, an hour at most. I didn’t hear him… I didn’t even hear the door close. Neither of you has heard from him?”

Adam’s mind couldn’t process the situation. But it was quickly dawning on him that Gansey knew whatever elusive thing it was about Ronan that he’d been trying to figure out, and somehow it had to do with this: a raven flapping desperately in its cage, frantic to escape, and an empty bed soaked with blood.

***

Ronan’s phone had been ringing almost nonstop since he’d started his car, and he idly wondered how many more calls it would take for the battery to die. He wished he could say that it was just this night, the adrenaline burning in his veins, that made him a terrible friend. He wished he could say that if it were any other time, he’d pick up his phone and soothe out his frazzled roommate.

But Ronan didn’t lie, and he hated phones even on a good day. But he would be home within the hour, his restlessness drained out of his system, and Gansey would understand. If there was anyone in this world who would understand, it was Gansey.

Gansey, who’d built a home with him when Ronan’s was wrenched from his grasp. Who was more an older brother to him than his real one. Who’d tolerated every one of Ronan’s dream things, from the benign to the destructive. From the showerhead that alternated between techno and the morning news to the creatures that had tried to rip both of them to shreds.

Finally, Ronan saw it. It was almost obscured by the blackness, and he almost missed it, but he cut a quick left down an unpaved path through the brush. From farther up the path, a pair of headlights flashed at him twice.

***

“He didn’t do this on purpose,” Adam said. It wasn’t a question, it was the truth. He didn’t need Gansey to affirm it, but he hoped Gansey would explain.

Gansey sighed, dragging his hand through his hair. “No.”

“It’s happened before,” Adam said.

Gansey looked at him, and the raw panic in his eyes startled Adam. “Yes.”

Adam steeled himself. Gansey was falling apart and Noah was shaking in the corner as he carefully poked a finger through the raven’s cage. If no one else could, Adam would step up and be in control for once. Just this one time.

“What happened last time? Where did he go?”Adam asked.

Noah looked up and shook his head. “Those aren’t the right questions…” he drifted off, and Adam’s patience was quickly spiraling to its end.

“You’re right. The past is irrelevant; this is a completely different setting. The question is where could he go _here_.” Gansey paced, idly trying Ronan’s cell again. “Who does he even know besides us?”

Noah and Adam locked eyes, and Adam felt both a whisper of hope and liquid hot dread. There was one other person who knew whatever secret it was that Gansey was still protecting.

“Kavinsky,” Noah whispered.

On their way out the door, Adam spotted the thing he’d stolen from Ronan and which Ronan had stolen back. He pocketed it.

***

“Well, well, princess. It’s been awhile.” Kavinsky’s smug grin wore a hole through something vital in Ronan, but it wasn’t enough to deter him. He cut his engine but left the headlights on and stepped out, squinting against the blackness to assess who else was there.

It seemed it was just Kavinsky’s usual group: Prokopenko, Skov, Swan, and Jiang, lounging across the hoods of their cars, smoke pluming around their heads. Disappointment registered in Ronan’s mind. _Boring._ He’d beaten them all before.

When Ronan stepped into the headlights, Kavinsky’s grin widened. “Got a little boo-boo, Lynch?” He reached into his passenger seat and came out with a beer, shoving it at Ronan before leaning close. “Somethin’ in your mind take a bite out of ya?”

Ronan looked down, uncomprehending, before he was struck dumb with shock. His arms were streaked with dried blood, blood he’d forgotten about because it was from wounds he hadn’t taken with him. He'd been dying in his dream, but all he'd taken back was the thorny rose. His only wounds were shallow ones sprinkled across his palms, and they'd already stopped bleeding.

A flood of guilt replaced disappointment; _that_ was why Gansey was calling. He'd seen the blood and thought it was like last time.

The beer bottle hit the dirt with a _thud_ as Ronan darted back to his driver side, fumbling under the seats for his phone. When he finally got it, Kavinsky stepped forward and neatly wrenched it from his hand.

“Ah ah, Lynch. You know our policy on phones out here.” He tapped at the screen and shook it, his eyes more than a little manic. “Looks like it’s dead, anyway. Shame.”

Finally, Ronan found his voice.

***

Once they’d assessed that the BMW was gone and they’d piled into Gansey’s Camaro, Adam realized that they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t even have enough information to make a plan. Gansey was fracturing and Noah was retreating into himself and Adam didn’t understand anything.

Who finds themselves in a bloody bed and, instead of heading to an emergency room or waking their roommate, heads to a drug-dealing creep? Who even finds themselves in a bloody bed on _accident_? What does that even entail? Adam struggled to fathom the unfathomable.

“Gansey, I think it’s time to explain.”

Noah sighed in the backseat, as though Adam was asking something unreasonable, as though Adam was picking a fight and he didn’t want to get into it. Gansey just stared a little helplessly at his hands where they rested on the steering wheel.

“Gansey, is Ronan’s trust more important than Ronan’s life?” Adam knew the question was a little unfair, but they’d already wasted a half hour and made no progress. Not to mention, Adam was exhausted.

Noah just sighed again, but when Adam whirled around in his seat to argue, Gansey finally started the car.

“Okay. We’re going to Kavinsky’s.”

***

Ronan had been angry before he got there, but it was more of a generalized, amorphous anger. Anger at his father, his older brother, and the secrets that bound them all. Now that the anger had a very, very direct target and the target was standing right in front of him, he was too angry to yell, too angry to swear, too angry for violence.

His voice was just this side of a whisper, restrained and seething. “You have five seconds to be straight with me before I leave and never come back.”

“I’m always straight.” Kavinsky tossed his hands out, beer spilling down his wrist, and grinned. His roommates laughed, but drugs made their motions dull and slow.

“Three,” Ronan said.

Kavinsky just smiled at him, his eyes hyper-focused and ringed with red.

“One.” Ronan backed up around the side of his car, his hand grabbing for the open door.

Kavinsky dropped his arms when Ronan chucked the one teal pill at him, but still he said nothing.

“Alright, I’m out.”

Ronan threw himself into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. He pulled into a dangerously sharp u-turn that left only a foot of space between the noses of his car and Kavinsky’s white Mitsubishi. He peeled out of there, tires sliding over the loose dirt.

Less than thirty seconds from the main street, Ronan’s rear-view mirror was flooded with white light. It flashed once, twice, three times, and Ronan was blinded.

But this, at least, was the type of conversation he could decipher.

***

“This is how it happened last time: Ronan left in the middle of the night, I called him over a million times, and finally I found him in an introspective pool of his own blood. I took him to the hospital and they interpreted it the only way they could.”

Gansey cut the engine and pulled up the parking break, but neither Adam nor Noah made any move to get out. Kavinsky’s house was dark, his car as well of all of his roommates’ was gone, and it was pretty clear this stop was a lost cause.

Adam heard the implication in the “they interpreted it the only way they could,” and he was impatient. A memory came to him in the form of a sensation rather than a picture: ridges on smooth skin.

Gansey sighed, and anyone else might have thought it dramatic and overdone, but it mirrored Adam's thoughts. He looked meaningfully between Noah and Adam for several long moments, and Adam just about punched the window out. _There wasn’t time for this._

“The truth is that he hadn’t tried to kill himself. His dreams had.”

Noah leaned forward, his arms against the back of Adam’s seat. “His dreams had what?”

But Adam’s mind got there faster. His dreams had tried to kill him. If Ronan could manifest something from thin air while he slept, who was to say it would always be as benign as the thing he’d found in Ronan’s hands?

“When you say his _dreams_ , do you mean that figuratively or literally?” Adam asked, because he needed to hear Gansey say it.

“I mean literally.” Gansey leaned back in his seat. “I mean he can pull things from his dreams, and sometimes his dreams are nightmares.”

At the same time as Adam said, “ _That’s_ what Kavinsky knows…” Noah said, “We have to find him, Gansey.”

***

Ronan couldn’t remember the first time he’d street raced. It was after his father died, because it was after he owned the BMW. It was after he’d moved in with Gansey, because it was Gansey who’d spent the night searching for him. It was before he’d told Gansey about his dreams, though, because the night he told Gansey about his dreams was also the night he’d agreed to stop racing.

The night he’d told Gansey about his dreams, he’d been hooked up to an IV and woken to Gansey and his brother arguing over who would take him home. Gansey had won, probably because Declan had let him, but he’d told Ronan he’d send him back to Declan if the racing continued. So he’d stopped. For awhile.

Ronan was pretty sure it wasn’t technically lying, so long as Gansey never explicitly asked. He'd never actually said he'd stop, it was only implied, and he never claimed he had. He'd come clean tonight, though, because he owed Gansey that kind of honesty after making him worry for the last hour.

He just had one thing he had to do first.

***

“What does Ronan usually do when he’s upset—”

“—or doesn’t want to sleep?”

“Well, uh. Drink. Drive. Hit something... Hopefully not in that order.” Gansey stopped himself and scrubbed a hand down his face. “Oh, no. That was terrible. I’m just so tired.”

Noah gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, but Adam didn’t understand why the car still wasn’t on yet.

“So he’s driving. And Kavinsky’s gang is out. Where would they go? Kavinsky would take him to the hospital if it was bad, right?”

Adam remembered the way Kavinsky had stopped his roommates from attacking Ronan, and he hoped that protective instinct was still intact.

Something seemed to occur to Gansey, and his grip tightened on the steering wheel.

“Jesus, Ronan, why?” Gansey muttered to himself, then looked back up at Adam. “They’re racing.”

Now that he had a solid lead on what Ronan was doing, Gansey seemed to get hold of himself. He pushed himself upright against the seat, shoulders squared, and flicked on the ignition. The Camaro peeled away from main campus as Gansey began methodically scouring the streets, looping the surrounding area in wider and wider circles.

In the passenger seat, Adam took a moment to pull out the dream object. It was about the size of Adam’s palm, a small box made of some type of dark wood, carved on the outside with elaborate vines and thorn-less roses. He found a golden latch, and when he flicked it open and carefully lifted the lid, all that he saw was one small black feather. On closer inspection, Adam realized the black feather was suspended in air, floating a good half inch above the bottom of the inside of the box, fluttering slightly from flow of the Camaro’s heater. When Gansey pulled a turn or the road curved, the feather moved, too, changing its position in the box. After about four turns, Adam realized it was a compass.

“My God, can you believe we’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes already? Why can’t we find him?” Gansey asked, darting his eyes across the center console to meet Adam’s. When he saw what Adam was looking at, though, his expression changed. “Where did you get that?”

“Why?” Adam wasn’t trying to be rude, but he was startled by Gansey’s tone.

“That’s from the Barns. The Lynch family home.”

***

The thing about racing in the area around campus was that once you got beyond the shopping centers and clusters of suburban housing, the streets became abruptly rural, dark, two-lane highways. The benefit of this was that no one was around, and cops could be spotted from miles away. The disadvantage of this was that there was only one lane in either direction, which made things a little more difficult.

Kavinsky didn’t seem to mind, though. He pulled to a stop next to Ronan’s car, backwards in the lane, facing the non-existent oncoming traffic. Ronan slid his window down and his adrenaline spiked when Kavinsky did the same.

“This is how it’s gonna be. You manage to beat me in that shitbox, I’ll tell you what you wanna know. If I beat you, which I will, you let me show you something. Yeah?” He flicked his cigarette out the passenger window and it landed just shy of Ronan’s front tire. “This is a life-changing moment, Lynch. You feel it?”

Ronan just stared at him. “We go on three.”

Kavinsky tossed his head back, laughing. “We go _now._ ”

Ronan didn’t miss a beat. He was careening after Kavinsky in a fraction of a second.

The BMW caught up quickly, and Ronan was the better driver. The Mitsubishi sagged as Kavinsky botched a shift, lurched forward as he stepped on the gas. Ronan just soared, smooth and easy, his entire reality stripping down to just headlights and asphalt. It was exactly what he’d needed, and he was determined to end this soon. It was time for some answers.

He shifted gears, preparing for the final stretch, and checked his rear view mirrors for Kavinsky’s headlights. Except, they weren’t there. One blink, and the Mitsubishi was to his left. Another, and it was half a car length in front of him. Another, and the BMW’s nose was in line with Kavinsky’s back bumper.

Another, and the road was flooded with headlights speeding towards them from the opposing direction, rapidly approaching in their rightful lane, a dozen seconds away from crushing Kavinsky’s car. Sheer panic froze Ronan; in a instant, his hands were numb. He was helpless. Kavinsky was ahead of him in the other lane. If either of them braked too hard, they’d fishtail and slam into one another. All he could do was gently fall back and hope Kavinsky timed it in well.

Kavinsky did not. He cut into Ronan’s lane so abruptly, so close, that Ronan’s only choice was to jerk a hard right to clear some room for the Mitsubishi. He acted on pure instinct, but he hadn’t taken into account the guard rail that suddenly began a few car lengths ahead. His options were hit Kavinsky, hit the oncoming car, or hit the guardrail.

He didn’t have time to make the choice; the guardrail hit him.

***

Gansey gave up, and Adam didn’t blame him. They’d been out for over an hour, scoured every mile of street directly surrounding campus, and short of widening their radius to an impossible five or ten or twenty miles, they were out of options.

They headed back to the dorms, fatigue and irritation and worry deadening to numbness, and conceded defeat. All that was left was to call the hospitals and the local police department, and then wait until Ronan got hold of them.

***

Ronan wasn’t awake, but he wasn’t dreaming. For a suspended eternity, he wasn’t anything; he was a nameless, amorphous, unconscious thing—and then suddenly he wasn’t.

Ronan was being tugged painfully by his wrists, and then there was a weight under his left arm, and a weight against his left side, and an anchor around his back, and a voice screaming in his ear, and the ground felt both inches from his face and miles away.

He was dropped down on something soft, but his head knocked back into something hard.

“Motherfucking hell, what in the godda—” Ronan heard words, fading in and out, and then his head was cushioned, and then it was him who faded out.

Ronan's eyes rolled open to a slap across his face and a very sober Kavinsky, so close he was a blur.

“Are you fucking dead, Lynch?”

Ronan couldn’t move.

“Why the fuck did you do that? What the _fuck_ , Lynch? _Wake the hell up, or I swear to God—_ ”

And then Ronan was darkness again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> meanwhile, Blue's fast asleep in her safe bed because   
>  1\. I didn't think Gansey would call her with a Ronan problem so soon into their friendship   
>  2\. I couldn't juggle a sixth character   
>  i'm over on [tumblr](http://qvnseys.tumblr.com/) :)


	6. The Lesson

### Chapter Text

Ronan’s entire reality was stripped down to the bare essentials of the present moment: headlights, a white Mitsubishi, and a guardrail. Gold curls flashed through his head for a fraction of a second, and then all he knew was sound and force. An explosive cacophony of abruptly diverted inertia. Later, he’d realize it didn’t happen the way he’d always anticipated a car wreck might go—and he _had_ anticipated it, sometimes; he always figured if it wasn’t by a night horror, his death would find him along the side of a road. In the instant it happened, though, it felt so much worse and so much _more_ than he could ever have imagined in his most desperate nightmares. Some types of pain are unthinkable, which was something he should have learned a few years ago; he’d been trying to fathom the unfathomable, and he’d been completely off the mark.

And then he was darkness, unfeeling and unaware.

And then he _wasn’t_ , and he hit the ground with the kind of force that quickly rivaled the impact of the guard rail. When he could finally move, he opened his eyes, expecting blackness, the smell of burnt rubber, his car crushed beyond recognition in a heap of metal carnage. He expected an ambulance, an inconvenienced Declan, a crying Matthew, a disappointed Gansey. He expected a breathalyzer, a tow truck, and a white Mitsubishi peeling away, uncaring.

What he saw, though, was so different from his expectations that for a disorienting second he thought he’d dreamt everything. Or died, even, except this didn't look like Hell the only Heaven he could imagine featured a warm greeting from his father. He was in a _forest_. Or a meadow, surrounded by forest. And it wasn’t night; it was the kind of blinding mid-afternoon that came only with summer. It was beautiful, painfully so, and he knew this wasn’t his dream because he’d never dreamt anything this _good_ before. His dreams looked more like the wrecked scene he’d just escaped than the pure scene before him.

He sat up, finally, and found that the pain was so much less than what he’d braced himself for. He turned his neck slowly, trying to stretch through the ache, and caught a glimpse of something uncannily familiar at the edge of the forest. Small hooves, big eyes. Before he could give it conscious thought, he was waving the creature towards him like he would have done to Matthew. But the creature refused, cowering farther back in the foliage.

And that’s when he heard the rustle behind him. He whirled, summoning anger to mask his fear, and was struck dumb with who he saw.

“Easy, Lynch. Think you hit your head pretty hard there.”

***

Adam was in his bed, moonlight creeping in through the slivers of space between duct tape and cardboard. He hadn’t gotten around to fixing the window yet, but he figured it really wasn’t his to fix. Almost nothing in this whole town _was_ his, except for the diploma he’d have in four months and the few belongings he’d begun gathering for college. His most prized possessions were intangible—his education, his success, his independence, his future.

His father didn’t see it that way, but then again his father was the reason the window was broken in the first place. He hadn’t gone near Adam in almost a year and Adam marveled at the fact that somehow that hadn’t made life any easier. The incident had left his father no less angry and had only increased his mother's distance and sullenness. Now that Adam was no longer his father’s outlet, it came out in other ways. Like a beer bottle through a window, for one. Adam waded through a turbulent sea of violence, always in the eye of the storm and always untouched, but never quite unafraid.

He couldn’t remember what time he’d gone to sleep, or what had woke him up, or even what day it was. He only knew that he could map out this little trailer blindfolded; he could close his eyes and walk through it in his mind, every detail a tangible and unhappy reality.

He sighed. _Four more months._ He tugged at his blanket and rolled over.

When the left side of his face hit his pillow, he realized he was in his dorm. He wasn’t sure how he’d confused it for his corner of the trailer, but Noah was sprawled across his bed, eerie and pale in the strange moonlight. Adam knew Gansey had difficulty sleeping and Ronan had a fear of sleeping, but Noah’s insomnia trumped all of theirs. He had his phone propped on the pillow beside him, watching something quietly on the small screen, and the flashing lights cast deep shadows around his eyes. Finally, he looked up at Adam, his eyes kind but worried.

“You should pick it up,” said Noah, and Adam finally processed the fact that his phone was ringing, frantic techno repeating over and over.

Adam didn’t understand, but he picked it up. “Hello?”

“Adam.” It took him only a second to recognize Gansey’s voice on the line, a confusing blend of both anger and…grief? “Where’s Ronan?”

It took him just one second more to recognize the implication of what Gansey was asking him, and blind panic flooded him. He’d seen Ronan earlier, but he couldn’t remember where, or under what circumstances. How long had it been? Why couldn’t he remember?

“Adam,” Gansey repeated. “Where is Ronan?”

Adam didn’t know, but he wanted to know. He wanted the phone call to be over; he wanted to be asleep; he wanted to wake up.

Gansey’s tone was angry this time. “ _Where is Ronan?”_

He didn’t know, he didn’t know, he didn’t know—

And then he was gently pulled away.

Soft fingers brushed Adam’s hair off his face, and when his vision focused his whole world was Blue, crouched in front of him with bags under her eyes and a tray of coffees in her hand.

“Gansey called me,” she said. She passed him a coffee and aimed for a smile but fell a little short. “So, I guess magic’s real?”

***

“What the _hell_?” Ronan didn’t understand anything, and the little clearing seemed to change ever so slightly with Kavinsky’s presence. Ronan wasn't sure what the difference was, exactly, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.

“Welcome to my world, man. We’re gonna have that talk now, yeah?” Kavinsky absently reached down to rip up a handful of brush from the ground, and Ronan could have sworn he felt… protestation? Pain? But it wasn’t coming from him, and he didn’t understand anything. “Proko’s gonna call Dick, so we don’t have a lot of time. You ready to listen?”

“Gansey’s coming here? Where is this? _What_ is this?”

“ _This_ ,” Kavinsky spun around, his arms outstretched like a victorious boxer in his ring or a cruel ruler among his people. “This is my own personal Walmart, man.”

Ronan looked around, and he still didn’t understand. His mind was foggy and kept getting snagged on the details. He couldn't even track with how this place and Walmart could end up in the same thought or sentence or universe; he realized this place was like the Barns, like a small little world secluded away from the ugly real world of politicians and money and high school diplomas.

“Catch up, man. Or do I gotta do it for you?” Kavinsky was sneering, but Ronan just stared at him. “Alright. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen, you weren’t supposed to crash your goddamn car. I was supposed to Yoda your ass and show you the way, but you never fucking _listened_. All those times I tried to tell you.”

“The crash was real?” Ronan’s mind stripped itself down to a new set of bare essentials: shiny charcoal paint and his father’s booming voice.

“Yeah, man. The crash was real. You hit a guard rail at about 100 miles an hour. Guess your shitbox isn’t so much of a shitbox, is it?”

Kavinsky smirked. He smirked, as if he wasn’t telling Ronan that he’d destroyed the most important thing that was left of father, as if he wasn’t breaking something vital in Ronan’s chest. Ronan couldn’t move. His _car._ His beautiful BMW; his father’s beautiful BMW.

“I thought you knew how to _drive_ , man, I thought you knew the basics. You could have braked—hell, you could have hit the Mitsu. Why the fucking _guardrail?”_ There was an edge to Kavinsky’s voice, but Ronan couldn’t quite place it. It wasn’t concern and it certainly wasn’t remorse. It wasn’t pity and it wasn’t quite care. It sounded like _desperation_ , which was probably about as close to any of those emotions as Kavinsky could get.

“So I’m dead, then,” Ronan said, because it finally made sense. Hell was a place with Kavinsky. He probably deserved as much.

Kavinsky just laughed. “You wish, man. Okay, listen carefully. The lesson begins now.”

***

Adam’s watch read 4:58 a.m., just over two hours since he’d been pulled from sleep by Gansey’s phone call. Two dizzying hours of adrenaline, exhaustion, frustration; two dizzying hours that still weren’t resolved, that continued to tick forward into Adam’s present moment with every passing second.

For someone who’d spent the last four years of his life carefully squirreling away and doling out every hour of his time, Adam was surprisingly out of sync with it. It might have just been his current fatigue, but he realized that he had no concept of time passing or his position within it, and as far as he could tell he hadn’t for awhile.

From where he stood right now, it could be minutes after Gansey had first called him or it could be minutes before falling asleep at the library yesterday. It could be his irritable afternoon during midterms week or it could be the day he’d moved into the dorms. Time seemed so acutely circular to him, he felt he could reach out to any of these individual moments, inhabit them anew, and change their outcome.

Adam’s mind ached. He was being asked to deal with something he barely believed in and definitely didn’t understand. He was asked to do it on only an hour of sleep, with the clock rapidly carrying him forward into reality. In two hours, Commons would be open for breakfast, and dozens of pajama-wearing freshmen would shuffle in for coffee and muffins. In three hours, his shift at the bookstore would begin, and he’d spend six hours dealing with the over-caffeinated and under-polite public. In nine hours, his under division writing class would be in full swing, the TA cheerily returning graded midterm papers to twenty-five cheerless freshmen.

In thirty hours, his Latin assignment was due, and it was still covered in Ronan’s writing.

Time. Reality. Magic. Dream things. A raven, finally asleep in its cage after thirty minutes of continuous _kerah_ ’s. A handsome blue-eyed boy who Adam thought he had all the time in the world to slowly understand, missing and unreachable.

He was playing idly with Ronan’s dream compass, gently blowing on the feather and watching it return to its original position, when a blatantly obvious fact occurred to him. The feather wasn’t pointing north; it wasn’t pointing in _any_ of the four directions, exactly—

And finally the phone rang.

***

“I had no idea you were at _cars_ , man. I thought you were still at pens and the occasional raven, but here you’d dreamt yourself a fucking _bumpercar._ ”

Ronan had already found that if he showed any curiosity or asked any questions, Kavinsky would refuse him. He’d asked Kavinsky, “how did you know about me?” and Kavinsky had just said “wrong question.” He’d asked, “how did I get here?” and Kavinsky had replied “doesn’t matter right now.” He’d asked, “how did we get to the same place?” and Kavinsky had just laughed. So now, he figured silence was his best option, no matter how desperately he wanted to know what had happened to his car.

“So you already know how to do it, yeah? Maybe you’re just lacking finesse. I’ll give you a run-down anyway.” Kavinsky pulled at a tree, breaking off a branch and tossing it into a little creek that ran past it. Again, Ronan felt a wave of protest, but it wasn’t a conscious decision. He wasn’t even sure if it was _his_ wave of protest. Unlike Blue, he wasn't inclined to be particularly protective of nature to begin with.

 _“_ So you got something you wanna get. You gotta know exactly what it is going in. You know the shape, the weight, the smell, you gotta know it like you already have it, right? And then you go straight to your place. Why would you go anywhere else? You already know where your shit’s gonna be, you go there.”

Ronan didn’t understand; go to his _place_? His dreams weren’t malleable things, his dreams spit him out wherever they would, thrust upon him whatever horror they could, and more often than not tried to rip him to shreds. Creating Chainsaw had been an accident; deliberately creating a battery for Adam’s watch had been torturous.

“This one’s mine.” Kavinsky looked at Ronan and winked. “But you can share it, for now.”

Ronan watched as Kavinsky’s foot jerked, but it didn’t seem like it was his own doing. Kavinsky looked unconcerned.

“Alright, Proko’s got Dick on the phone, so I guess I’ll wrap this up for now.” Ronan just stared, so Kavinsky continued, that same desperate edge back in his voice. “I really thought you were dead, man. I thought you were a goner for sure.”

Ronan finally spoke, and he hated how broken his voice sounded. “My car?”

Kavinsky snorted. “Typical. Your car’s fine, man, whatever magical shit you dreamt up worked.” Ronan didn’t understand. _Fine_? “Saved your damn life, too. Just looks like a weird fender bender. Nothing your mechanic boyfriend can’t fix—”

Ronan froze. Mechanic? Adam worked at the bookstore—no, Adam wasn’t his boyfriend. His car was _fine_?

“Ha, didn’t know about that, didya? You know, communication’s the foundation of all good relationships. Anyway. You’ll have to dream yourself some new airbags—patent that shit, man. Make millions..."

For the first time since Ronan had met him, Kavinsky looked a little chagrined. Only ever so slightly, but it was there nonetheless. “And, uh—side effects include dizziness for a few hours. But, I figured you’d have that anyway. Your face is wrecked, man, should probably check that out.”

An image of a teal pill floated across Ronan’s brain, and white hot anger shot through him.

“Did you fucking _drug_ me?”

Kavinsky backed away, smiling, his arms up defensively. “Did what I hadda do, man. You understand.”

Another image, and Ronan's hands were fists. “Wait- did you _hit_ _my face?_ " He was seething, his anger incompatible with this beautiful place. "After I’d been in a fucking _accident_?”

Kavinsky shrugged ruefully. “Did you not hear me, man? I said I thought you were _dead._ That’s not me, though—” He gestured vaguely at Ronan’s face, which he could only imagine was covered in bruises. “Shoulda dreamt yourself a softer steering wheel.”

And then Ronan was alone, surrounded by green, surrounded by silence. He felt a sigh of relief that wasn’t his own, and then he sighed too.

***

Gansey’s anger was a tangible thing, filling the Camaro and taking control of the steering wheel, careening them away from campus for the second time that night with intent and vigor. It was only a few minutes after 5a.m., and after a frustratingly brief and uninformative phone conversation with Kavinsky’s roommate Prokopenko, they’d peeled out of the dorms.

The phone call had pulled Adam out of the endlessly circular loop of time as he perceived it, and stuck him with precision in the present moment. He was now acutely aware of every minute as it passed and the weight it held, each one counting down towards whatever horror Ronan had found himself in. Proko’s words had been both vague—“it was bad, but like, not that bad, I think he's alright, man”—and horrifically detailed—“hit the guardrail at, like, at least 100 mph, just crushed right into it, the car in the other lane didn’t even slow”—which was a blend that left both too much and not enough to the imagination.

They hadn’t called an ambulance, which Adam couldn’t fathom, but he’d become so desensitized by fatigue and confusion that he couldn’t find it in himself to question it. He could patient; with Gansey’s speeding, Adam would have information soon.

It was still dark, as sunrises in November were soft and lazy affairs that didn’t roll around til almost 7am, but the crowd of cars splattered across the lanes was still unmistakable from a distance. Gansey slowed the Camaro to a stop, and ice-cold fear climbed up Adam’s neck. This wasn’t a movie set or the evening news. This was real, the skid marks veering across the shoulder were real, the smell of burnt rubber and metal was real.

Gansey was out of the car in an instant, Blue hot on his heels. Noah sucked in a long breath, his eyes wide and glassy, and slowly headed out of the car. Adam felt numb.

Kavinsky sauntered over, hands in his pockets, casual as ever. As if this wasn’t the worst crisis Adam had ever known.

“Where is Ronan?” Gansey asked. A muscle in his jaw twitched, but his tone was curt and formal.

Kavinsky’s gaze flickered to Adam. “You brought Parrish? That’s cute.” His eyes scanned down Adam’s frame, and Adam was suddenly very aware of his mismatched clothing: threadbare sweatpants, shower shoes, and his warmest—and also most formal—coat.

Gansey stepped in front of Adam, blocking Kavinsky’s unsettling gaze. He looked powerful; Adam didn’t understand how Kavinsky wasn’t slightly afraid.

Gansey’s tone was angry now. “ _Where is Ronan?_ ” It was so reminiscent of Adam’s dream earlier that he felt an unsettling moment of pure vertigo. Time. Dreams. Magic. Reality?

Kavinsky shrugged. “He’s having a life-changing moment, man.”

Kavinsky flung open his backseat’s door, and Gansey immediately slid in, crouching beside Ronan’s legs and reaching for Ronan’s hand. He began methodically tracing Ronan’s skin from elbow to wrist, checking each arm for wounds. Noah and Blue approached from the other door, and Noah placed his fingers against Ronan’s temples, soothing away the sweat and bruises.

“ _Wake up,”_ Noah whispered.

***

There were very few things that Ronan could hold to be true right now, but this was one of them: this place, whatever it was, was not Kavinsky’s. He might have found it, he might inhabit it in his dreams, he might use it for his taking, but it was fundamentally and profoundly _not his._

Ronan couldn’t explain how he knew this, but the truth of it whispered its way through the ruffling of tree leaves, the gurgling of the creek, the breeze against his face. A place like this couldn’t be Kavinsky’s, and it didn’t seem to want him there.

Time had no meaning here, but it was a long while before he finally saw those hooves and wide eyes again. The creature—a girl, he realized—slowly inched her way out from the tree trunks and vines, and came to sit a few yards from him. He realized why she was familiar—she’d dotted a handful of his dreams in the last few months.

 _“Reversi estis,_ ” she said, and Ronan was stunned. Latin? He wasn’t sure if what she'd said was a question or a statement or if it was even grammatically correct. His Latin was fairly good, but he was too tired for it right now.

“English?”

“You’ll come back,” she said, handing him a dandelion.

Ronan didn’t know what to say because he wasn't sure he agreed.

She smiled at him and then he felt something cool against his forehead and a warm weight on his right wrist. The slight pressure of metal and leather pressing into his skin pulled a memory to his consciousness, blending the boundary between dreams and reality. It was a snapshot from Saturday night, and he lived in it over and over again for a strange, suspended eternity: Adam, his sleepy fingers gentle around Ronan’s wrist, his thumb slipping under leather. It wasn’t much, but it was enough, and Ronan thought that if he had to inhabit one fifteen-second memory forever, this one wasn't so bad.

And then he was awake.

***

Adam registered one selfish moment of jealousy—jealousy that Gansey could check Ronan for wounds, that Noah could smooth his fingers over Ronan’s hair, that those touches didn’t cost anything, didn’t carry any horrible weight. It wasn’t them and it wasn’t Ronan, it was just the fact of people being able to touch one another so easily and carelessly. It felt like a club he hadn’t yet gained membership to.

And then Blue was circling around the car, probably to be closer to Gansey, but she linked her arm through Adam’s. He barely had time to process horror at the bruises blooming across Ronan’s face before it was replaced by surprise. In one moment there wasn’t, and in the next there _was:_ a dandelion springing up out of Ronan’s hand. Even though Gansey had spent the night explaining Ronan’s ability, the dandelion was so incongruous with the rest of the scene that Adam couldn’t understand. Blue sucked in a breath and reached for it, spinning it around in her hand for a moment before she startled back as Ronan’s eyes finally opened.

Adam didn’t even have time to feel relief. In an instant Ronan was wrenching himself out of Kavinsky’s car, his eyes dark and murderous.

“How do I get back there?” Ronan demanded, a finger jabbing into Kavinsky’s chest.

Kavinsky just swatted Ronan’s hand away, laughing. “Feeling a little touchy, babe? Sad I left you there alone?”

“ _Tell me how to get back there._ ”

Kavinsky shoved himself half-way into his driver seat, and when he turned on the engine Gansey, Noah, and Blue had only a second to jump away and slam the doors closed. He leaned out the window, a grin splitting his face in two.

“Find me. That’ll be our next lesson.” Kavinsky peeled away unceremoniously and his roommates quickly followed suit, leaving dust and a tangible silence.

Adam wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he’d imagined finally finding Ronan, but it wasn’t this. It wasn't yet another fight with Kavinsky or the smell of gasoline or an angry Ronan or more unsolvable riddles. It wasn't meant to be something so anticlimactic and unsatisfying, not after a night of frazzled nerves and frustration and fear and worry.

“Ronan,” Gansey spoke carefully, like he was talking to a small child. “Ronan, where is this blood from?”

“It was from my dream...” Finally Ronan looked at him. He looked vacant, at a loss for words. He looked like he wasn’t fully grounded in reality. “I tried to call you-”

“Tell me everything later. I’m just so relieved you’re safe, Ronan. You have no idea.” Adam watched as the fight finally drained out of Gansey, his shoulders slightly slumped in exhaustion. Ronan noticed it, too, and he shoved his hands in his pockets awkwardly before pulling them back out to clap Gansey on the shoulder.

Noah sidled up to Ronan’s side and knocked elbows with Ronan. The gesture was playful and the words he spoke were simple, but his tone was painfully sincere. “We were worried.”

Ronan bumped his shoulder and looked appropriately chagrined, his voice low. "I'm sorry, man."

Next, Ronan saw Blue and nodded. “Sargent, you look like hell.”

 _“I_ look like hell? You’re really telling _me_ that?” Blue exhaled a scoff, more exasperated than angry. She marched up to Ronan and held out a fist. Ronan looked downright touched and returned the gesture, knocking his knuckles against hers— but then Blue was flinging her arms around his waist in a quick hug and he was shoving her off, the picture of irritation. Adam knew better: the tips of Ronan’s ears flushed as he bit back a smile.

Then finally, _finally_ Ronan turned to Adam, and Adam realized he'd been wrong. This wasn’t anticlimactic; this wasn’t unsatisfying. Ronan, a mere five feet away, his eyes locked on Adam's—it wasn’t much, but it was enough. It was more than enough.

“Parrish.”

“Lynch," Adam said. He studied the dark bruises pluming under Ronan’s eyes and up his temple, and he realized that if this were a different world or if they were different people, he'd be allowed to bring his fingers up to gently trace them. It took him a moment to notice Ronan was observing him right back.

“Do you think they make me look tougher?” Ronan asked, a smirk firmly planted across his face. It looked a little horrific against the grey and purple backdrop that was his skin.

Adam could play along, though. He forced his mouth into a small smile. “They make you look like a loser,” he said.

And then Ronan laughed. He clapped Noah on the back and pulled Gansey into a very brief, very manly hug, and Adam felt the world’s axis slowly tilt back into place.

***

Time. Dreams. Magic. Reality. Time and reality finally won out: of all the things, Adam had _work._ The policy on missing a shift was strict, the result of years of students calling out last minute from hangovers or over-sleeping. If you missed a shift, even if you had a viable excuse, you were cut from the rest of your shifts that week. A whole week of work was something Adam Parrish couldn’t afford to lose, no matter how exhausted he was.

Clocking in, dragging his nametag lanyard over his head, signing into the register—Adam struggled to understand how Ronan lived his daily life. Irritated customers, receipts jammed in the machine, declined credit cards— _this_ felt like the dream, a pale version of reality.

On break, he flipped through the myriad of text messages from Gansey and smirked. Even in the aftermath of all of this, Ronan could still be a little shit. He’d dragged his heels about heading to the hospital to be checked out; he was sullen and rude to the nurses and doctor; he intentionally fidgeted during his x-rays. All he cared about was getting back to his car; would Adam mind taking a look at it later?; although, it's a dream car- but hopefully the basics were the same.

Finally, _finally_ Adam clocked out and slowly trekked back to his dorm. Noah was out, probably at class, and Adam left the door unlocked for him. He let himself fall into bed, the hard dorm mattress somehow feeling like marshmallows. He was _tired._

He reached across to his desk and pulled Ronan’s dream compass towards him, gently nudging the feather this way and that, sleepiness slowing down his movements.

He heard a sharp knock on the door, and then the handle was opening before Adam could even answer, accompanied by a string of “Yo Gansey’s passed out can I hang in here?”

Adam shot up, trying to hide the compass, but Ronan’s eyes were already on it. He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress, his left hand just an inch from Adam’s right. When he held out his right hand, Adam put the compass into it.

“This old thing,” Ronan said. He blew across the feather, and it insistently returned to its original position again and again. Finally he turned to Adam, his voice hesitant. “I can show you where it points, someday. If you want.”

Adam was surprised, but he nodded. And then Ronan nodded, too, and slipped just his pinky against Adam’s wrist, so faint it could have been mistaken as an accident, a mere shift of the mattress.

When Adam woke up a few hours later, the sun had just barely set and Ronan was asleep on the floor, propped up against Adam’s bed, the exact reverse of the night of Kavinsky’s party. Adam gave it just a moment’s thought—time was still so circular—and then he let his eyes drift closed again.


	7. The Fall-out

The next several days passed by in an awkward dance of carefully avoided topics, but Adam was too busy to mind. With the worst of Ronan’s crisis mostly behind them—he was safe and alive if not cranky and very bruised— Adam dove head-first into his schoolwork, determined to never have as stressful a round of exams as the previous week had been. As his midterm grades slowly rolled in, he realized he couldn't afford to cram last-minute for his finals: he’d only gotten a 92% on his Intro to Political Science exam, which was just _barely_ an A-.

Dropping shifts at work wasn’t an option, so all he could do was cut back on sleep and double up on study hours. It seemed Gansey had the same idea, and quickly the group established a new pattern of meeting in the library each afternoon _—_ even Ronan showed up, as Gansey was very unsubtly keeping a tight leash on him.

The only problem was that now that Ronan’s secret had been spilt, everyone was burning for answers. It was surreal to just pretend nothing had happened but for the most part they avoided the subject, quickly adapting to Ronan’s very polite “none of your fucking business” attitude. But there were times when Gansey broke, dragging his wireframes off his face and shooting a barrage of questions Ronan’s way. Like now, for example. Adam didn’t blame him, but he knew better than to join in. Ronan operated on his own timeline.

“Ronan. Why didn’t you tell me your father could…“ Gansey looked around conspiratorially before dropping his voice to a whisper. “…do what you do? I know the BMW was his.”

This caught Adam’s attention, as he hadn’t pieced that part of the puzzle together yet. But Ronan didn’t move a muscle; enormous headphones were slung over his ears, rendering him completely lost to the world. Adam neatly pulled them off, earning a flash of bared teeth. _If looks could kill_ , Adam thought, rolling his eyes.

Gansey repeated himself, and Ronan just huffed.

“Are we really back to twenty questions?”

Blue chimed in, a baby carrot half-way to her mouth. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to want answers. We did spend half the night looking for you.”

“Nobody asked you to, maggot.”

Adam’s eyes darted to Blue, bracing for an all-out declaration of war, but Blue just scowled and muttered _excuse me for caring._ Gansey was still waiting for an answer, leaning forward across the table, his face expectant. Ronan seemed to notice, too, and he conceded defeat.

“He told me not to tell anyone.” Ronan shrugged, but the set of his shoulders was tense. “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

“But, you told me about _you—“_

“Jesus, Gansey.” Ronan scraped a hand down the back of his head, irritation bristling. “Some secrets are meant to go to the _grave_. And his did…” He paused, tapping his pen restlessly against the table, and then shrugged. “Until now, I guess.”

Adam was frozen, the world quickly tilting beneath his feet as he tried to reframe everything he thought he knew about Ronan Lynch. This truth, that Ronan had lost his father, was somehow more impossible to process than the truth about Ronan’s dreams— but Ronan’s headphones were already sliding back into place and his gaze was trained downward, and Adam knew better than to push it.

***

Ronan was trying very, very hard to toe the line, mostly for the sake of preserving what little remained of Gansey’s sanity. He skipped no classes, he begrudgingly confined himself to the dorms from dusk til dawn, and he even endured the pain of actually answering his phone when Gansey called. After everything, Ronan believed he owed him that—at least for the next few weeks, anyway.

But that didn’t stop him from trying, every night since the crash, to get back to Kavinsky’s forest—or rather, the forest Kavinsky had shown him. Every night he’d lie in bed with the details etched in his mind: the deep green ivy crawling up hollowed tree trunks, the quiet murmur of the creek, a flash of hooves. But every night he fell into the same nightmare: blinding headlights, the drag of asphalt, a slap into consciousness. That was horrific in its own right, but the real nightmare was that Ronan was quickly losing the distinction between being awake and being asleep.

He usually could feel the difference, could sort out the painful boundaries between reality and his own creations, but some nights it was harder. On the rare occasion that those lines did blur, like when he’d dreamt that he was back at the Barns, he attributed it to mere desperation. When you’re fathoms deep in your own mind, what was the difference between a dream and a memory? Did it even matter?

Ronan was starting to think that it did. If Kavinsky was right, if the trick to pulling something from a dream was to fundamentally know it in its entirety, then wouldn’t the magic lie in precisely those boundaries between memory and dream, between dream and reality? It had to be a memory before you fell into the dream, but it had to become reality even as you were asleep.

Ronan would never admit it, but a very, very small part of him wanted that teal pill. Just once, just to get back to that forest one time, just to _understand_. The girl had said he’d come back, but he was quickly realizing it would be impossible. Unless he followed Kavinsky up on that next lesson.

“Ronan,” Gansey said, dragging a hand through his hair. It was late, past midnight, but Gansey was an insomniac by nature and Ronan’s disappearance hadn’t helped matters. Not to mention, Adam was crammed in the corner with Blue, talking her through a research paper, and Noah was sprawled across Gansey’s bed. If Ronan had known the notion of personal space would shatter when his windshield did, he would’ve thought twice about leaving that night. “Did you know your father had dreamt the BMW?”

In an instant, Ronan felt four pairs of eyes on him.

“No. Kind of. I don’t know—I hadn’t thought about it, but in hindsight it's obvious. The VIN is all wrong.”

“Did you know, then, on some level, that when you’d hit the guardrail you’d be okay?” Ronan looked up at Gansey, hating the question even as it was asked. “I mean, in the moment it happened—did you know you’d survive?”

Ronan might not lie, but he could also choose not to answer.

The silence extended, and Ronan felt he could practically see the gears shifting in Gansey's brain. The way his face crumpled in understanding was enough to keep Ronan’s eyes carefully trained away from everyone else’s.

***

Thursday evenings at the bookstore were dull affairs, and Adam was barely staying awake. His coworkers were gathered by the main registers, swapping insider jokes and weekend plans, but Adam was alone in manning the express register by the side door. He didn’t entirely mind as this was the easily the best job he’d ever had. At least it gave him time to process the last few days.

On Tuesday, he’d woken up to a completely different reality, one in which magic was real, one in which objects could be pulled from dreams and entire worlds existed out of sight, and he wasn’t yet sure what to make of it.

Even as a child, magic had never particularly appealed to Adam. The idea of fantastical realms seemed like an indulgent escape from reality, an escape that did nothing to actually _improve_ that reality. Other children dove nose-deep into stories about kingdoms and monsters and heroes or crashed through the dusty trailer park with swords made of weeds, but Adam had always focused on his education. Education was the only ticket out of his reality, and everything else he’d devoted his time to had all served the same purpose: the three jobs he’d worked to pay for private school tuition, the hours of college applications and scholarship essays, the half-hearted extra-curriculars.

It almost felt like a betrayal to realize that for all those years, he’d been wrong. There _was_ another world out there, he just didn’t have access to it. Because of course he didn’t, because he was Adam Parrish in a world of Ronan Lynches and Richard Ganseys.

But on Tuesday he’d also woken up to a decidedly irritable and bruised Ronan, the dreaming son of a dreamer in a nightmare world. The guy who’d driven head-first into a guardrail to avoid hitting Kavinsky, the guy whose mind could actually kill him, the guy whose father ha—

The guy who was standing right in front of him, a greasy bag in hand.

“Oh, no. Is this really gonna be a thing? You buying me food?” Adam scowled as Ronan pulled out a box of curly fries, but he was met with a smirk. He dusted off his pride and tried something else. “Thank you.”

Ronan snorted back a laugh. “God, don’t hurt yourself or anything.” He leaned against the counter before thinking better of it, flashing his eyes down the empty aisles. “Is this gonna get you fired?”

“Nope, I’m off in a couple minutes anyway. I’m surprised Gansey let you out of his sight.”

“Ha,” Ronan sneered. “He’s sleeping. You’re on babysitting duty.”

“Lucky me.”

“What, no burning questions for me? Now’s your chance.” Ronan's tone was acidic and the words promised a fight. Adam refused the bait, pulling out a greasy fry to give himself time to contemplate.

Yes, Adam’s initial worry and panic had quickly spiraled into profound frustration— frustration at Ronan’s recklessness, at Kavinsky’s strange and lethal hold over him, even at the hours of time that had been wasted. And it was true that he had a dozen questions, but Adam didn’t know where the lines were and he didn’t want to cross them. Least of all when Ronan was trying, in his own abrasive and stilted way, to do something nice for him.

“Nope, figured you’ve shared enough secrets this week. Check back on Monday, though.” Adam aimed for a cheery smirk, and Ronan rolled his eyes. Adam grabbed another fry, pretending to take another moment to consider. “Your face does look like hell, though.”

“My face is a work of art, Parrish.” Ronan scoffed, grabbing Adam’s fry. “ _Anyway_. Does that mean it’s my turn?”

“Your turn?”

“To ask questions.”

“Oh, uh—yeah, sure.” Adam wasn’t sure what secret he had that could possibly rival all of Ronan’s.

Ronan nodded and rocked back on his heels, looking away for a long moment before flashing his eyes back to Adam’s.

“How did you lose hearing in your left ear?”

Adam almost choked.

“Straight for the kill shot,” Adam said, and Ronan just shrugged, his expression intense and serious. Adam went for the truth, stripped down to its barest essentials. “My father shoved me, and I hit the railing of our porch stairs on my way down.”

Adam braced himself for an explosion of rage or righteous indignation, well-aware that Ronan’s default setting anger. Instead, Ronan just nodded once, the muscle in his jaw working, the picture of restraint. His eyes gave him away, though, but they were saved by the bell.

Adam’s shift was up, and he excused himself to clock out.

***

Ronan was pretty sure that when God created Fridays, the intent wasn't that they be used for studying, but apparently no one else in the group knew the meaning of relaxing after a tedious week of schoolwork. It had gotten to the point where sheer boredom forced Ronan into productivity. With the last of his essay behind him—a useless 11 pages comparing Sappho’s lyrics to Aeschylus’ _Agamemnon –_ Ronan shoved his books across the desk and settled his head gingerly atop his forearms.

Ronan knew Adam was nothing if not analytical, so he was probably burning to piece together the puzzle. He could practically see the questions on Adam’s face: if your father was magic, was your mother as well? Are your brothers? How did you father die? When? How does dreaming work? What’s the purpose? What’s the _limit_?

But instead of pelting him with questions, Adam had laid down his arms and given Ronan an answer of his own. _My father shoved me, and I hit the railing._ The worst part was how simply, how emotionlessly Adam had said it. There was no anger, there was only acceptance. Which meant that Adam was no stranger to violence, which gnawed at something deep inside of Ronan. It was sharper and more painful than anger, but Ronan didn’t have the word for it. Adam was all elegant shoulders and lean wrists, kind eyes and a cautious smile, and the thought—

“Ronan,” Gansey said, nudging him in the shoulder. Ronan sighed and sat up, bracing himself once again for the Spanish Inquisition. It would have been easier if Gansey had just typed up a list and asked everything all at once, rather than slowly stewing on the topic, dragging it out for days. “When Kavinsky said, ‘sad I left you there alone?’ what did he mean? Where were you?”

“We were in a dream.” That, at least, was an easy question with an easy answer.

But Gansey’s eyes nearly fell out of their sockets and Ronan didn’t miss the way Adam’s head bolted up from his textbook, curiosity plastered across his face.

“You can dream… together?” Adam asked, trying each word out carefully, his eyes wide. Ronan resented the implication.

“In the same place? At the same time?” Gansey’s quest for knowledge was a fierce thing, and his eyes were alight with this new revelation. Ronan didn’t share the enthusiasm.

“I guess—I don’t know, I just ended up there. He gave me one of his pills, and—“

“He _drugged_ you? He drags you from a car wreck and his first thought is to _drug_ you?” Blue’s tone was horrified, and secretly Ronan appreciated the concern. Very secretly.

“Yes, _maggot_ , if you want to be technical, but—”

“I swear to God,” Gansey began, his chest puffing with indignation. “If I _ever_ see him again…”

Ronan just scoffed. There was no "if"; they would definitely be seeing him again.

“It’s not exactly like the crash was Kavinsky’s fault—"

“Not Kavinsky’s fault,” Adam echoed, the curiosity rapidly morphing into something else. “Are you—are you really defending him?”

“ _No,”_ Ronan snapped, his temper simmering. The only thing keeping him in check was the bite of leather between his teeth. “I’m just saying, I was the one behind the wheel.”

Gansey stared at him for a long moment before deciding on another question. “What exactly did the pill do?”

“I don’t know—"

“And where did you end up?” Blue asked.

“I _said_ I don’t fucking—"

“And why did you want to go back?” This was Adam, his voice carefully casual. When Ronan looked up at him, though, his eyes looked almost betrayed.

So finally, begrudgingly, with the most creative swearing he could devise, Ronan explained the forest and Kavinsky’s tutelage about bringing objects back and the hoofed girl who visited his dreams, trying very hard to not find it irritating the way Gansey frantically wrote all of it down in his fat leather notebook.

***

It was a Saturday, so technically Adam didn't have any school work that _needed_ to be done, at least not right away. But once again they were all spread out around an enormous wooden desk in the library, an elaborate lamp enclosing their corner in a warm golden glow. Unable to focus, Adam’s eyes kept drifting to the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching as the sky debated between rain and snow.

The walk from the dorms to campus had been punctuated by a shrieking Blue, desperately trying to protect her spiky ponytail from sludgy ice, and a gleeful Noah, who kept hopping into puddles and drenching everyone. Gansey was the only one who’d emerged unscathed; with a brisk shake of his coat, he’d entered the library looking just as tidy as when he’d left. Ronan, fundamentally opposed to anything practical, had opted against an umbrella and was now sulking on the floor against the wall, looking very much like a half-drowned rat, the image made complete by the beads of water nestled into his cropped hair.

They probably should have stayed in the dorms and saved themselves the trip, but the weather meant that everyone _else_ had holed up there too. Most of the time, Adam almost forgot that they shared the hall with some fifty other students, but today the study lounges were transformed into small party areas, replete with a grinding bass and a scattered mess of chips. So, to the library they’d gone.

Gansey groaned, pulling his glasses off to rub his eyes. “I should have just taken French. Do you think I can transfer?”

“Not this late in the term. I think I’m stuck with Latin through this year, too…”

“Ugh.” Gansey pushed his book away, clearly done for the time being. His fingers ran reflexively down the length of another book, a worn leather notebook rendered floppy from use, and it was a habit that Adam didn’t understand but was well-acquainted with. Two months was not nearly enough time to skim the surface of another person’s secrets, and Adam had never pried.

“Adam,” Gansey began, pulling the notebook towards him, an excited glint in his eye. “What do you know about Welsh kings?”

Ronan’s head shot up, suddenly very interested, and joined them at the table before Adam could respond.

“God, Gansey, you’re really starting this again?” Ronan asked, but he sounded more amused than annoyed.

“I never _stopped_ with it. It’s just—" Gansey pulled a pen to his teeth then tried again, arranging his words carefully. “I bet you never imagined there was someone besides you and your father. Now there’s Kavinsky, which suggests that this is a recurring phenomenon. I want to understand the trigger. Don’t you?” Ronan just stared, so Gansey continued. “I think we should ask Kavinsky about his experience.”

Ronan choked on nothing. “His— _experience_? Are you fucking kidding? He’s batshit.”

Gansey nodded, still thoughtful. “He’s unstable and rather volatile, yes. But don’t you want to know?”

Adam could follow, but only to a point. Yes, it seemed like it was recurring, so yes, there must be something that catalyzed it or some common variable, but— “What does that have to do with Welsh kings?”

Gansey straightened back in his seat, his shoulders neatly squared. “Well! When I was researching Welsh kings—”

“What Dick’s trying to say, Parrish, is that he’s been trying to uncover some dead guy, and his body’s supposed to lie on an energy line, and in _theory_ —“ Ronan glared up at Gansey for a weighted moment before continuing. “In theory, the whole dream thing is an energy thing too.”

“An energy line,” Adam echoed.

“A ley line,” Gansey corrected.

“A _ley_ line?”

This was Blue, and when Adam turned to her he saw that her eyebrows were half-way up her forehead, shock etched across her face.

Ronan’s eyes narrowed in an instant. “What do _you_ know about ley lines?”

And that was how Adam learned that Blue had a few secrets of her own.

***

Ronan Lynch did not ask people for favors. He was fairly certain that there was nothing he couldn’t half-ass his way through on his own, and just about nothing was worth the indignity of owing somebody something. That’s why there was some very, very small part of him that could relate to Adam’s resistance to accepting things from others. And any other time, he’d agree—it’s just, he really missed his BMW, and this was one thing he most certainly could not half-ass his way through. His knowledge of cars pretty much began and ended with an intuitive understanding of a smooth gear shift and the heady thrill of tires on asphalt.

But Kavinsky’s taunt about _mechanic boyfriend_ and Gansey’s affirmation – “the Camaro hasn’t broken down once since school started, who else did you think we had to thank for that?”—told Ronan that there was somebody who might possibly be able to help. Especially given that the car was a dream thing and he didn’t think an average mechanic could sort it out. Luckily for Ronan, Adam was far from average.

“Ronan. Ronan, stop being a baby and just _look_ at it—” Adam pulled Ronan’s fingers from where they were caged protectively across his eyes, and Ronan tried not to get caught up in the feel of knuckle against knuckle, skin against skin. “God, you're eighteen and can’t even look at your own car."

“I’m nineteen, loser, and I’ll look at it when you’re done.”

“How are you nineteen?” Adam looked dumbfounded, like he was trying to do the math and kept coming up short.

Ronan shrugged. “My birthday was last month.”

“ _What_?” Adam asked, but Ronan just rolled his eyes. Birthdays didn’t mean anything; he’d gone out to an obligatory breakfast with Matthew and Declan the Sunday after, anyway. “Well… happy belated birthday, then.”

“Yeah, yeah. Your present can be my car.”

Adam huffed but got back to work, and Ronan was more than happy to watch. Adam looked uncharacteristically untidy in work coveralls and grease stains, his eyes a little tired and his cheeks more than a little flushed, a distracting smudge of black raked through the front of his messy hair. It had been a long day and Adam was probably exhausted, but Ronan thought he wore it well.

They were, of all places, at Adam’s old work, which had taken no small amount of persuasion on Ronan’s part. He was intensely grateful for the strange tricks that had protected the car from being demolished, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the remaining repairs couldn’t just be done in the dorm parking lot. Adam had gaped at him, exasperated, when he’d suggested as much.

“I didn’t just bring an entire auto-repair shop to school with me, you know,” he’d said, and that’s how Ronan had gotten the idea.

A few phone calls and a lot of shameless begging later, Ronan had arranged a 7a.m. tow and a ride to Boyd’s, who apparently owed Adam a few favors. Adam had gotten free reign of the shop for the day, which meant Ronan had gotten free reign of Adam’s time. The morning had passed in comfortable silence, only broken by intermittent, surprisingly amiable moments of conversation.

That is, until Ronan had pulled up a map on his phone to see where exactly the hell they were in the state of Virginia—it literally looked like the middle of nowhere, a small town with a smaller business district, a couple of high schools, and a whole lot of dirt—and realized they were only a half hour from Henrietta.

“Parrish,” Ronan had begun, carefully. “Was there a reason you never told me and Gansey that your high school was the actual scum of the earth?”

There were only two high schools for miles around: one was a standard public one and the other was Aglionby’s nemesis in every regard, from lacrosse matches to test scores. Ronan would bet a million dollars — so, about a third of his trust fund — that someone as smart as Adam had gone to the latter. Not that Ronan actually gave a shit about school pride and long-standing rivalries, but provoking Adam was quickly becoming one of his greatest joys.

Adam had flushed red. “What, like you still consider yourself a _raven_ _boy?_ I can’t even believe they accepted you in the first place.”

The ensuing scuffle could account for the grease stain across Adam’s forehead and the streak of black across Ronan’s shirt, not that Ronan minded. At all.

***

Adam thought he’d seen Ronan smile before, but he'd been wrong. Ronan’s default expression was either a scowl, a grimace, or a frown and on the very rare occasion that something akin to humor scraped his surface, it appeared in the form of smirks, sneers, the literal biting back of a grin. This, what Adam was seeing right now, was Ronan’s _real_ smile. And it was actually blinding.

Adam still didn't know why he'd let Ronan persuade him into doing this in the first place and he was incredibly anxious to get back to campus, and not just because he had class in the morning. Boyd was nice enough, but the truth was that once he'd left it, Adam had never intended to return to this town. At least, not so soon... But Adam could see that Ronan was desperate- who else could they trust to deal with a dreamt car?- and he'd finally, inexplicably, conceded defeat.

One day was nowhere near enough time to even _begin_ to repair a car, especially one that was a dubious blend of real mechanics and dreamt physics, but he’d done the best he could. It was drivable, if not entirely safe: the airbags needed replacing, for one, which left gaping holes throughout the interior of the car, and he hadn’t been able to find the correct bulbs for the signal lights. But the engine turned over and the exterior damage was mostly sorted out, and apparently Ronan was easily pleased. Especially given that he hadn't even _looked_ at the car all week, clearly imagining shattered windshields and crumpled hoods. It really hadn't been that bad.

“Adam Parrish, you’re a goddamn motherfucking genius, the salt of this fucking earth, I swear to God. The car looks fucking perfect.”

Adam rolled his eyes; the car definitely did not look perfect. But it did look _better._

“You know, when you swear so much it’s difficult to tell whether you’re happy or raging.”

“I’m happy, Parrish, I’m very fucking happy. So soak this shit in and then never speak of it again, it’s a one-time deal.”

Ronan was pacing, restless energy buzzing off of him in waves, and he was physically unable to keep his hands off the car, trailing the curve of the roof and across the hood. When he finally looked up, something vital in Adam stuttered. This was how Ronan should _always_ be, a tightly coiled spring seconds from bursting, a promise of exploding light and creative energy. _Happy_ seemed an understatement, and Adam was glued to the spot, overwhelmed.

Finally Ronan seemed to reign it in a little. He stopped pacing, he opened the driver’s side door very carefully and sat down, fluttering his hands over the steering wheel and dashboard. He looked up at Adam, eyes doubtful.

“I know it’s not—it still needs work and…” Ronan gestured at the blown air bags. “But—can I drive it back?”

Adam balked. The car would run fine, he was sure of it, and it was only an hour back to campus, but—

“I know you probably think I’m a shit driver,” Ronan said quietly, staring at his hands on the dash. “So I can call Gansey to get you.”

Adam didn’t understand the sudden shift in mood; it felt like whiplash.

“Uh, no, it's—yeah, we can drive it back,” Adam said, a small part of him calculating the odds of another crash so soon. Surely not _that_ likely.

Ronan lit up like a firework, his fist clenching the gear shift with confidence, and that’s when Adam heard the telling bell of the shop’s front door. Seconds later, Boyd appeared.

“Hey, guys,” Boyd nodded at Adam and Ronan. “I’m afraid I’ve gotta close ‘er up for the night. Just about done?”

“Yeah, we’re just heading out.”

Boyd nodded again, then shoved his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight from his left foot to his right and then back again. Something flipped in Adam’s stomach, already anticipating his words.

“Listen, I, uh—I saw your dad in town, today, and— well, it felt wrong to just not tell him you were here. So…”

Boyd stepped aside, revealing a figure hovering at the threshold.

“Hi, son.”


	8. The Attempt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimers!   
>  1\. Nothing bad happens with Adam's father, I promise you.   
>  2\. I know Ronan is often classist and derisive to Adam about his upbringing, but this is college!Ronan and I like to imagine he's mellowed and matured.   
>  AKA I can't handle his shit so I'm not gon' write it.

When Ronan had envisioned Adam’s father, he’d pictured a big beast of a middle-aged man, all foaming mouth and raging eyes, thick forearms and cruel brows. It was an amorphous image, lacking distinctive features and carved more so out of Ronan’s own seething hatred than based on anything realistic. Because Ronan did hate him, by default and for reasons too numerous to count, beginning with Adam’s usual rejection of touch and ending with the way he was now frozen, hands still tangled in the rag he’d been using to dry his fingers.

What he _hadn’t_ pictured was a tall, fair, tired-looking man who looked at once like Adam and unlike him. Ronan had spent enough time memorizing Adam to see exactly where the distinctions and similarities lie: they shared the same furrowed eyebrows, the thin lips set in a frown, the same general build and coloring. But where the father’s blue eyes were empty and dulled, Adam’s were sharp, analytical. And he knew Adam’s smile, and he didn’t see how it would fit on the other man’s face.

The instant Adam’s father stepped into the light of the garage, Ronan tensed, bracing to toss Adam in the car and bolt. But Adam was handling the situation, transforming rapidly into something more grounded and solid and self-assured.

“Dad,” Adam said, the slender curve of his shoulders straightening into a neat square.

It was clear that Adam’s father was waiting for more, waiting for _anything,_ but Adam just stood there, his eyes locked on his father’s, his expression neutral. He was staring him down, and Ronan was impressed. It seemed that Boyd didn’t share Ronan’s sentiment; he shuffled a few more times on his feet before muttering that he needed to get the keys and retreating out the door. _Coward._

Uncomfortable under Adam’s passive gaze, the father’s eyes flickered to the BMW and then to Ronan, where he still sat in the driver’s seat, but they didn’t linger. Ronan was beginning to understand something: this wasn’t the promise of a fight, this was two people who had nothing left to say to each other and an insurmountable river of bad blood between them, irresolvable but heatless. This was just a feeble, tired echo of a years’-old dynamic, the eerie silence of the wreckage after a battle, and it colored the room with more sadness than anger.

“Son,” he said again, like he was testing the weight of the word. “Your mother sends her— regards.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, but the words were stilted. His hands were clenched tight around the rag. “Send her mine, too.”

His father nodded and turned slightly, like he was making to leave, but then he stopped himself.

“She also hopes that you’re doing—” His eyes wandered back to the BMW, like it had the answers. “You know.”

Adam kept his gaze trained on his father, stony-eyed and expressionless, and nodded ever so slightly. The silence extended, morphing from expectant to uncomfortable, and finally Adam’s father conceded defeat.

“Yeah,” he said, one finger tracing the peeling paint of the threshold. He eyed Adam like a stranger for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll just—” he cut himself off and turned, halfway out the door, and then he was gone.

Adam remained motionless, staring at the void that was his father’s silhouette, the fight visibly draining out of him. This was the quietest, most ostensibly civil battle Ronan had ever witnessed, and it was sobering. He’d thought his and Declan’s hatred knew no rival: when they fought, they fought to _hurt_ —to hurt themselves and one another—as violence had been their way of communicating when words were inadequate. Years of broken noses and scratched car hoods, years of Gansey’s intervention and collateral damage, years of impossibly cruel sneers and seething anger.

But this… this was different from the kind of mutually-inflicted damage Declan and Ronan had done to each other, and it would have bred a different kind of hatred. It was surreal that Adam could face it with silence and passivity, and it was even more surreal to realize that those were effective weapons.

That so few words could so misshape everything, suck the air out of the garage and render the last twelve hours irrelevant, was an unfairness. And it was Ronan's fault for dragging Adam back here. He wanted to pry Adam’s fingers off the rag; he wanted to go back to brawling about high schools.

Instead, he shoved the keys in the ignition and flicked the engine to life.

“I’m fucking starving, Parrish, let’s get McDonald’s.”

***

It did not escape Adam’s notice that Ronan was driving, for once in his life, conscientiously: hovering just barely over the speed limit, slowing appropriately for banks and turns, braking early and gently. He also didn’t miss that Ronan had driven straight past the one McDonald’s in town without stopping and was now pulling over on one of the empty streets outside of town. Luckily, it wasn’t the one that led to his parents’ trailer.

Ronan shifted the gear into park and pulled up the emergency brake, ripping off his seatbelt and flinging open the door before Adam could ask why they were stopped.

When he came to passenger side door and opened it, leaning against the frame expectantly, Adam just stared up at him. He didn’t understand, and he really didn’t want to talk. Not about his parents, or his home, or his past, or the shame of it all… Not about Ronan’s father, his dreams, Gansey’s king, Blue’s family. Not about any of it. Two months of space from his parents hadn't been long enough, and he felt numbed by the effort it had taken to face his father. He was out of words, but he found two.

“No McDonald’s?”

“Get out, Parrish.”

Adam was confused but he reflexively unlatched the seatbelt. Ronan’s impatience crackled like electricity, rolling off his skin in waves, and with a huff he reached in and caught Adam’s forearms, tugging him out of the car. And then Adam was standing, Ronan’s chest a short eight inches from his own, Ronan’s piercing blue eyes _right there—_ and then with a quick turn he was being propelled towards the driver’s side door.

“What—”

“You’re driving us back.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I said you’re driving. You fixed it, you should drive it.” He smoothed a hand over the paint then flashed a satisfied smirk. “This is a gift, Parrish. Braver men than you have tried and failed to get their hands all over my stick shift.”

“ _God,_ Ronan, you’re disgusting.” Adam groaned, but Ronan’s smirk broke into a grin. He slammed the door and slid into the passenger seat, and Adam reluctantly settled into the driver’s side. “I learned on an automatic, though. I can’t drive this.”

“You have your license?” Ronan waited for Adam to nod. “Then tonight is the night you learn how to drive stick. I’ll throw you a Bar Mitzvah when we’re done.”

Adam rolled his eyes, but finally he understood. This was Ronan helping Adam the only way he knew how: pulling Adam into his own trademarked brand of therapy, mile signs and lane lines. He buckled himself in then stared a little helplessly at the pedals. He knew the technicalities of cars inside and out, could describe the precise mechanics of the clutch snagging, the gear shifting, the engine turning over… but in practice he was lost.

Ronan huffed again before sliding across the center console and pointing at each pedal.

“Come on, mechanic. Clutch. Brake. Gas.” Ronan nudged Adam’s left knee until he rested his left foot on the clutch pedal without pressure. “Right foot for the other two, obviously. Okay. Clutch and brake all the way down, then get it in neutral.”

Adam placed a hand tentatively on the stick shift, then leaned in to read the letters, trying to find _N_. Ronan sighed like Adam was committing sacrilege, then flung his left hand on top of Adam’s right, guiding him through the slots to show where neutral lay in the middle.

“Confidence, Parrish. You just have to feel it. Now flick the ignition.”

Adam turned on the car, but pressing down with both feet at once felt fundamentally wrong. He eyed Ronan warily. At least if he stalled the car he’d probably be able to fix it.

“Yep,” Ronan said, popping the _p_. With a neat flick of his wrist he released the emergency brake.  “Now for first. Actually…” He returned Adam’s wary gaze, which did nothing for Adam’s confidence. “Uh. Keep the clutch and brake down, but here—”

Adam allowed his hand to be guided through the gears over and over until he felt ridiculous, and finally Ronan talked him through easing off the clutch and slipping into first gear—which is when, of course, the car gave a sick shudder and stilled.

“I _told_ you this wasn’t a good—”

“Fucking relax, man, and do it again.”

Adam did it again, and again, and after the third time he started to genuinely worry for the car.

“Listen, I don’t think—”

“Christ, Parrish.” With a hand over Adam’s, Ronan guided the stick shift up and down and up again like he was trying to commit it to Adam’s muscle memory. “That’s the easy part. And the clutch—you just have to feel it. Find the sweet spot and ease into it.”

 “God,” Adam groaned, his patience nearly extinguished. “Is this really gonna be a thing? Just hours of sexual innuendo until I finally manage to get the car going?”

Ronan pulled back, offense written across his face. “What? _No_ , I didn’t—I’m serious, you literally have to get a feel for where it—” He mimed pulling the stick into gear and easing off the clutch then broke off irritably. “Whatever.”

He watched Adam once again try to get to first, but kept a solid cushion of space between them. The rest of the lesson followed in the same way: Ronan patiently—well, as patiently as he was able—talking Adam through gear shifts, intervening when necessary but keeping any physical contact to a bare minimum.

When Adam finally got them into third gear successfully, Ronan let out a wild _woop!,_ sliding his window down and gesturing for Adam to do the same. Adam was at nowhere near the speeds that he knew Ronan drove, but with crisp black November air rushing at his face and some horribly dirty beat pulsing through the stereo and nothing but dust and asphalt for miles around, he realized he felt inexplicably and incomparably _good._

He watched as Ronan threw an arm out the window, leaning it against the outside of the door before tilting his head just slightly towards the wind, relaxed and unguarded. Adam knew there was a joke there, somewhere—but it was outweighed by intense fascination at this strange moment, this small period of time which existed separate from the rest of the hours that made up his life.

Learning to drive the first time had been a perfunctory affair handled by Boyd so that Adam could tackle tows and roadside fixes, and the entire topic of cars served as another reminder of Adam’s personal lot in life. He’d never had his own, so he’d forced himself to not care about having one; driving was simply an aspect of work. But _this._ He realized he could see the appeal in this.

They were nowhere near campus, though, as he’d just stayed on wide loops outside of his parents’ hometown, and he was starting to get tired. An hour of freeway driving, exhaustion, and inexperience seemed like a bad mix.

“How do I shift back down?” Adam had to raise his voice over the music and wind.

Ronan looked confused as he pulled away from whatever he’d been thinking, but then he laughed.

“The same as you shifted up, loser,” he said, like it was easy, like Adam had been doing this for years and not just an hour. Coordinating the pedals was difficult enough, let alone making sure to slot the gear shift into the correct place.

Ronan must have read the panic in his eyes because he stopped laughing and flicked off the music, then grabbed the stick shift over Adam’s hand once again. His skin was warm and dry, his pulse thrumming through his fingertips as he helped guide the car back into a stop along the side of the road and flicked the gear into park.

With the music cut and no wind, silence weighed down the car like a third passenger. Adam waited for Ronan to remove his hand so they could switch seats, but one moment turned into two and then three and when he finally looked up, Ronan’s eyes were trained down on their hands. He’d just barely begun to pull away when Ronan’s thumb dragged a fraction of an inch, just following the slight groove of Adam’s knuckle, the motion and pressure so indistinct it was most certainly unintentional. But in the dark, alone, surrounded by nothing but quiet and dirt, it left a small blooming of warmth that Adam didn’t understand but maybe kind of wanted to—

And then Ronan cleared his throat and met Adam’s gaze and peeled his hand away, and a series of mechanical motions landed Adam back in the passenger seat and the car back on the road.

***

It’s not like it hadn’t occurred to Ronan that one way of dealing with a damaged dream car was to just dream up a new one, because it definitely had. He’d considered with it would entail – Kavinsky’s help, a half dozen or more attempts, the repeated threat of each dream becoming a nightmare – but none of that was why he resisted the idea. At this point, both Kavinsky and night terrors were inevitabilities either way: there would be no avoiding Kavinsky now, and every night that he closed his eyes bore the same possibility.

It was just that dreaming a new car wouldn’t actually fix the root of the problem and it wouldn’t soothe the guilt and horror of destroying his father’s car. He’d have a working car, yes. And it would be charcoal and sleek and incredibly powerful and, in theory, if he did it right, it would show all the same worn edges as the original BMW. The clutch would snag on the same shifts, the leather of the steering wheel would be rubbed a little raw, the passenger seat seams would be torn loose in some places.

But it would be a cheap facsimile of the original— the worn steering wheel meant nothing if it hadn’t come from years of his father’s impatient grip and the ripped seams would be a pointless echo of Ronan’s first trip to college, in which Chainsaw’s frantic flapping had given way to an hour of irritable pecking at the seat. The car, even with all its details made perfect, wouldn’t be the one that Ronan’s father had pulled from his own mind and it wouldn’t be the one whose squealing tires had always signaled, _finally,_ his return.

He didn’t just want another BMW, he wanted _this one_ , and it was uncomfortably significant for him that it was Adam who’d helped him get it back. Even if the damage hadn’t been so bad—which Adam adamantly claimed it hadn’t, but Ronan had refused to really look at the thing til he’d finished— it didn’t escape him that the car now bore permanent impressions from both his father’s and Adam’s touch. And he wasn’t sure he minded; in fact, he was very sure he _didn’t_ mind, but that only made it worse.

And that was why, for the first time in Ronan’s life, he was intensely grateful for the creation of cell phones and the power they had to summon people from their dorms, cram them into a BMW, drag them across town, and stuff them in a McDonald’s booth—which is to say, he was grateful for the buffer that Gansey and Blue and Noah were providing, because Adam kept looking at him, all considering and analytical, and Ronan didn’t have any answers. He didn’t even understand the question. The last two hundred or so hours were a surreal blur, a frustrating amalgam of dreams and reality that he hadn’t sorted through yet.

If anyone else noticed the weird energy crackling between them, they didn’t show it; Gansey and Blue were arguing about ley lines while Noah was carefully focused on building a tower out of ketchup packets. Ronan mostly tuned everything out, except—

“I think we should go to Henrietta,” Gansey said, a fry perched delicately between his index and middle finger. “Next weekend, I mean.”

“What—“

“Adam and Blue, you should make sure you don’t get scheduled for work.” Gansey nodded authoritatively before turning to Ronan. “And, given everything that’s happened, I’ll drive if you don’t mind.”

“Well that’s fucking _rude_ but also why—“

“Stop!” Blue punctuated her outburst by dropping her milkshake to the table, eyes narrowed. “You’re—you’re from _Henrietta?_ You guys aren’t all _raven boys,_ are you? _”_

Gansey looked properly chagrined. “Well, ah. Not all of us…”

“Show of hands, then?” Blue demanded, and Gansey gestured at just himself and Ronan. Blue looked at Noah and Adam and nodded solemnly. “I knew you guys were the good ones.”

Noah hung his head and spoke around his straw. “Well, actually, we did go to private schools, too…”

Blue flung her hands to the table in dismay, but, like always, it was Adam who asked the right questions, his cadence giving way to the slight drawl of sleepiness.

“How do you know about Aglionby? And Henrietta?” Adam asked.

Blue bristled. “Well, it… I— I _lived_ there, okay?”

“You… lived… in Henrietta?” Gansey asked, each word slow and careful. Ronan could practically see Gansey’s mind as it worked: flipping through the previous three years, lamenting every time he chose to eat on campus rather than around town, resenting the fact that Aglionby was an all-boys campus, ruing the star-crossed misfortune of having not met Blue earlier when they’d been so near to one another.

Blue clearly didn’t share the sentiment.

“Yes, I lived there, and if I’d known you went to _Aglionby_ , this right here,” she gestured between herself and Gansey and Ronan, “would not be a thing. _Raven boys_ , of all things, are you serious?”

Ronan snorted as Gansey deflated, but Adam spoke up before Blue could do any real damage.

“Uh, Gansey. When you say the weekend,” Adam began, “do you mean the entire weekend?”

“Well, yes,” Gansey said, surprised, like it hadn’t occurred to him that it would be a problem, that maybe the others had plans. Because it probably hadn’t.

“But—where would you guys stay?” Blue asked, the implication being a very adamant _not with me, that’s for sure._

Gansey’s hopefully expectant look, combined with a whole lot of unresolved guilt, could account for the words that begrudgingly slipped through Ronan’s teeth.

“Give me one good reason why you want me to turn the Barns into a hotel for the weekend.”

***

The reality of the day was hitting Adam in waves. The fact that he’d even agreed to take someone from his college world back to the world of his shameful past was incomprehensible, and he didn’t understand his oversight.  The fact that this someone had come face to face with, of all people, his _father_ was more than a cruel twist of fate, and the fact that this someone was _Ronan_ was impossibly unfair. The only one worse would have been Gansey, and that was just because Adam was pretty sure Gansey could only survive in the kind of purified air that was bred by wealth.

For the last two months, he’d tried to hide his financial anxieties from the group, only occasionally allowing himself to rant with Blue about randomly assigned technology fees and the unjust cost of their meal plan. To the others, a $68 charge was nothing, forgettable, an inconvenient but quick log-in to the campus billing website. To Adam and Blue, it was a much-needed textbook or a few weeks of groceries. But now there was no escaping it: Ronan had seen Adam’s father, his ratty t-shirt and dirt-stained jeans, his worn boots and unkempt hair. As if Kavinsky’s quip about _trailer parks_ wasn’t enough, now Ronan had physical evidence of Adam’s upbringing, his personal rung on the socioeconomic ladder. It didn’t matter that he’d escaped so long as his roots were still dusty.

And that was why, when everyone piled out of the BMW at the dorm and Ronan tugged on Adam’s elbow to hold him back, Adam shook him off irritably. Ronan loosened his grip but didn’t pull away.

“Parrish—”

“I don’t want to talk, Lynch.”

“Fuck would I wanna talk about?” Ronan fidgeted, staring at anywhere but Adam, and Adam’s impatience simmered. Finally he spit out the words. “I was just gonna say fucking thanks, okay?”

“Thanks,” Adam echoed, confused. For dragging Ronan to a front-row viewing of Adam’s past?

“Yeah. For only stalling the BMW three times. Anything more and she’d be a goner.” Ronan tried out a smirk, but Adam wasn’t in the mood.

“God. You know, it’s not like even I _asked_ you to—”

“Whoa. Jesus, Parrish. Chill. It’s a joke.” Ronan gestured at the car, and it hit Adam that he looked… _uncomfortable? “_ I just—the car looks good, man. And—I know today turned shitty, but.”

That wasn’t even a complete train of thought, but Ronan stayed silent, his brain most likely short-circuited by this rare attempt at gratitude. Adam gave it a few more moments, then nodded and turned to leave. They could stand awkwardly in silence on another day, one when he wasn’t so exhausted.

Ronan caught his arm again.

“Wait—I just. I get it. I mean—it’s different. Because. I wanted to go back.” He scrubbed a hand down the back of his head, still refusing eye contact. “But when it came down to staying there or following Gansey to college, it wasn’t much of a choice.”

Adam didn’t understand. He flipped back through what he knew about Ronan’s past: his life with Gansey at Monmouth, two brothers, his father’s death, a place called the Barns. He didn’t see which part Ronan was referring to.

“Try that again, but with complete sentences.”

"Asshole." Ronan flashed a glare. “I’m _saying—_ my dad… and my mom… The Barns, it’s just—”

“Wow, Lynch. That was actually worse.”

“Fuck you, Parrish.” Ronan scowled, and ordinarily Adam would have grinned back, pleased at how easy Ronan was to provoke. But Ronan was _trying_ and it was a fragile, tenuous thing. Adam waited patiently as Ronan pulled in a long breath through his nose and exhaled slowly through his mouth. “My dad’s will exiled us from home til we were 18. My mom’s in a coma. It was either stay there, alone, with her merry band of nurses, or suck it up and go to fucking _college._ You think I actually give a shit about Classics? Anything I do here, I could do ten times more on my own.”

Exiled, coma. The horrors of Ronan’s past seemed endless, a myriad of old wounds that just kept bleeding, and the incalculable depth of his friendship with Gansey—the fact that he’d chosen following Gansey over staying in his childhood home—pinched at one of Adam’s nerves. But he still didn’t understand what that had to do with today.

Ronan read his stunned silence and tried to continue, but it was strained.

“I’m just saying— I don’t know…”

Beneath Ronan’s hostility, his glares and scowls, Adam caught a wisp of helplessness, and finally Adam understood. This was Ronan trying to compare scars, to even the score a bit. A secret for a secret, a bit of stolen information for a bit of reluctantly given information. Adam didn’t know what to say; _I’m sorry_ was so inadequate it was almost an insult.

Instead, Adam’s mind was filled with the image of intricately carved wood, an impossible floating feather, a compass that didn’t point north.

“The compass points to the Barns, doesn’t it?”

Ronan pulled back slightly, stunned, and then laughed. “Yeah. Declan and I were little shits. We kept getting lost in the woods by the house, and Dad hated coming to find us. So one day he gave it to us, said we'd always find our way back to the house now. The thing he didn’t realize was we _purposely_ hid in the woods, so he’d come get us. Drag us out of there singing, with me on his shoulders and Declan running around us in circles. He realized it a few days later, though, when we kept doing it—”

Ronan broke off so abruptly it took Adam a moment to process it and when his eyes found Ronan's, what he saw there was painful. Just six hours earlier he’d seen Ronan equally unguarded, raw, a live nerve—but that was out of blinding happiness. _This_ was nostalgia, and longing, and a fundamental inability to find the right words, and Adam was overwhelmed. He didn't try to fill the silence, just kept his eyes trained on Ronan's.

The hand wrapped above Adam's elbow had tightened slightly, pulling Adam's attention away. He'd forgotten it was there; Ronan had just casually thrown it out to stop him from leaving, but now it was a secure weight holding him in place.  Instinctively he glanced down, and shame crept through him. He was still in his stupid work coveralls, a embarrassing vestige of his past that was now stained with grease and dirt from the garage floor, while Ronan was standing in front of him in jeans that probably cost more than a week’s paycheck and a snug Henley tee that Adam had stupidly wrecked during their fight.

Ronan’s hand squeezed again, just once, an attempt to get Adam’s attention back, and when he looked up Ronan’s eyes were _right there_ , closer and closer still as Ronan tugged him forward, and Adam didn’t understand. Somehow he was so close he could smell Ronan, all leather and dirt from a day around cars but also something incredibly clean, like aftershave maybe, except he wasn’t sure Ronan even _used_ aftershave—did Ronan even step foot in normal stores? Did Gansey do all their shopping for them, then?

And then Ronan swallowed, and his gaze trailed down Adam’s face before flickering back up and meeting Adam’s eyes, a silent question floating in the small space between them—and then time lurched into fast forward and understanding hit him like a train wreck. _Oh._ It was enough to pull Adam solidly into this moment, his mind swirling with headlights and stick shifts and leather and _Ronan,_ and he didn’t know what to do. His mouth felt dry and his palms felt sweaty, his arm was still trapped by Ronan’s hand and his jaw was startled by the feel of Ronan’s breath, and he was panicking... If he’d tugged on the string and followed its trajectory he probably would have anticipated this outcome, but he hadn’t known that Ronan—

And then Ronan was closing the space, two inches and then one and then just an infinitesimal fraction, so close Adam could feel the heat radiating off his skin— and then Adam tore himself away.

“Wait.” Adam pulled his arm loose and stepped back, and Ronan dropped his hand mechanically, the traces of hurt scrambling quickly off his face. “Wait, this isn’t just because of today, is it? Because—”

Ronan was silent for a moment then scoffed, his brows furrowed.

In an instant he was back in Adam’s space, a hand on Adam’s arm and another against his neck, and Adam forgot what he’d been trying to ask, reeled in by Ronan’s touch and grounded by warm lips against his own.

It was brief, and when Adam opened his eyes, Ronan's were still closed, his lashes hardly discernible against the still-dark bruises across his cheekbones. Adam reached a tentative hand up, slowly and carefully, until just his fingertips found the smudged edge of purple by Ronan's temple. He traced the outline lightly, trying to keep the pressure to a bare minimum, but he froze when Ronan's eyes fluttered open, wide and a little unfocused. They were still so close, and Adam realized that he could— if Ronan let him— easily erase that remaining distance.

And then a high-pitched, insistent techno beat cut through the silence, and Ronan was irritably digging out his phone.

"Fucking Gansey, I swear to God..." he muttered, but then he dutifully answered the phone, and a new series of mechanical motions landed Adam back in the dorms, perched in the corner of a study lounge and trying to process Gansey's frantic plans for next weekend.


	9. The Barns

Ronan liked to believe that the world was neatly divided into two kinds of people: those who are desperate to be known, who crave definition and understanding and validation—and those who really couldn’t give a shit either way.

On an everyday basis, he tended toward the latter. His high school years had been dotted with ignorant slurs about his friendship with Gansey, hardly-concealed speculation about the nature of his father’s death, wonderment at his and Declan’s fast cars and broken family. There’d been a litany of theories about his tattoo, from the amusing to the offensive, from admiration to disdain, and a mountain of criticism from teachers about his laziness, his dubious intelligence, his lack of ambition. None of it had mattered, though, because none of it even came close to the truth. He preferred it that way and he never felt the need to defend himself, because to him, _unknown_ was synonymous with _unharmed_.

And that was how he knew he'd most definitely fucked up. In less than one week he’d spilt almost all of his secrets, and it wasn’t the liberating catharsis he’d always thought it would be. It was having a staunchly guarded treasure box discovered, unlidded, and passed around the class for everyone to poke at and analyze, and he wanted to take it all back. Two months ago he’d been begging someone to not let him fall into a drunken sleep, and twelve hours ago that same someone had been fixing a car manifested from his father’s dreams. A week ago only two people had known he was a dreamer—Kavinsky and Gansey—and now five people did.

After a lifetime of secrecy, it was too fast. It was too much.

Especially now, as Gansey contemplated the first two of his secrets with a barely-awake, grease-stained boy who’d just taken his third.

“If Blue is right about the corpse road in Henrietta, then I think that’s a good place to—”

“Wait, Gansey,” Adam said around a yawn. He tugged at his hair, smoothing it off his face and willing it to lay flat, still unaware of the dirt streaked through it.  “Is this really about Ronan, or is this still about your search for Glendower?”

“I think they’re related,” Gansey said. He was on a roll, tonight— a professor at his podium, a scholar obsessed. “The dreams might be magic, but even magic needs an energy source. I would buy that the energy source is a person, that it’s genetic—but that doesn’t explain Kavinsky. So now I’d bet it has something do with the line… And, ah, it just so happens that a ritual like Glendower’s burial would also have needed an energy source. So…” Gansey broke out into an excited, uncharacteristic grin. “Two birds, right?”

“But if it’s based on an energy source,” Adam drawled, “does that mean there’s a limit?”

Before Ronan could answer, Adam straightened in his seat, suddenly fully alert. Ronan could practically see the floodgates unleash, could hear a week’s worth of rumination gain momentum before it was even uttered. It was the most words he'd ever heard Adam use in one go—

“Wait, _is_ there even a limit? I mean, compasses are one thing, but cars... Where would the line be drawn, then?” Adam paused, considering. Moments like these, Ronan could see how Adam and Gansey had become such quick friends. “If there _is_ a limit, would it based on size or physics, and how big is too big? And then there's sentient beings like your raven- would the limit be biological or just the amount of energy it would take? And then what else... an entirely new species?”

“Jesus fuck, Parrish…”  Ronan felt cold panic creeping up his neck. Adam had found exactly the right question, the question he’d carried with him since childhood. _What’s the limit?_ It haunted his daily life, singing him to sleep every night and greeting him again every morning when he flexed his hands, sitting beside him in church pews and wrapping itself securely around his throat during confessional. _Is there even a limit?_

But Gansey was nodding approvingly, frantically jotting all of this down in his notebook and Adam was looking at him, curious and analytical, and something in Ronan snapped. He was tired, and the box had already been rifled through. He might as well just empty its contents and be done with it.

“Before you guys come to the Barns, there’s probably something you should know,” he said.

And then Ronan lost his fourth secret, too.

***

The hours and days that made up Adam’s life were quickly rearranging themselves into some new structure, and he couldn’t decide how best to describe it. Was it five days of real life bracketed by two days of impossibilities, like magic and dreams and car wrecks and driving lessons, or was it two days of real life bracketed by five painful but necessary days of responsibilities, like work and class and studying?

Adam wasn’t sure, but it felt like he was losing his grasp on both components. The weekdays kept marching rapidly towards Saturday, and the weekends kept dissolving into oblivion once Monday came back around.

Between shifts at the bookstore and nights spent studying, Adam spent the week pouring over arcane Welsh history books and scholastic accounts of the supernatural. He wasn’t entirely convinced by Gansey’s logic or his plan, but at least ley lines were the kind of magic he could understand. Energy surges, electromagnetic frequencies, measurable changes in temperature and noise—these were based on quantifiable data and Gansey had a trove of research, both published and his own, to substantiate it. Much of it was dubious, but it was enough to give Adam probable cause to believe in it. Especially once he’d discovered the hidden caveat.

It was something he would have latched onto in high school, when he’d spent most nights curled against porch stairs, counting the endless specks of dirt and struggling to see a future that wasn’t trailer parks and violence. But it was something that Gansey seemed utterly unconcerned with, and Adam couldn’t fathom it. If all of this was real—ley lines and energy sources and sleeping kings—then it followed that the debt was real, too. That whoever woke Glendower was granted a favor.

Adam had no real need for favors, now; sheer willpower and grit had delivered him from his nightmare, and the reins of his life were fully gripped in his own hands. He had a place to live away from his parents and although _lonesome_ was a word he’d been bred to inhabit, that was nothing a favor might fix. That was the sort of thing solved by Blue’s fingers in his hair or Noah’s arms slung around his shoulders or Gansey’s earnest fist-bumps.

But still, he couldn’t shake his fixation, and he couldn’t understand Gansey’s lack thereof. What purpose was there in the sole act of waking a king? Was there really _nothing_ more that Gansey wanted?

The metallic scrape of a key against the doorknob pulled Adam from his research, and a glance at his watch had him groaning. When Gansey had left for class—two hours ago, now, as it was already 1p.m.—he’d encouraged Adam to stay in the dorm room and peruse his texts, clearly gratified beyond measure that Adam was taking an interest. But Adam hadn’t meant to stay so long, because—

“Oh, fuck.”

Clearly startled, Ronan’s foot got caught in the door as he took in the chaos. Textbooks and maps and crumpled papers bled out from the center of the room like an oil spill, and Adam was crouched in the center of it. They hadn't been avoiding each other, but it didn't escape Adam's notice that this was the first time they'd been alone since Sunday. He wasn't surprised at all when Ronan only barely managed a, “Hey, Parrish.”

Adam checked on what remained of his pride and smoothed it out. He’d already chalked the kiss up to Ronan being _Ronan_ : impossibly resistant to verbal communication and incapable of expressing vulnerability. It had been a moment of confusion, of misplaced emotion, and Adam was okay with it. But that didn’t mean he had to stay confined in a small dorm room with the guy.

“Lynch,” Adam nodded, then began separating his textbooks out from the mess. “Gansey let me in, but I was just heading out.”

“Cool.” Ronan stood there and watched him for a moment, then asked, “You got work?”

Adam shook his head. He was blissfully free for the rest of the day except for some reading he’d planned to get ahead on.

Ronan just looked away and rocked back on his heels once, and Adam’s patience began burning itself out. They shared the same group of friends; seeing each other was an inevitability and it was illogical to make things awkward.

Finally Ronan spoke, and it took Adam a second to process the words.

“All these maps and shit are fucking claustrophobic.” Ronan pulled out his keys and jangled them. “Wanna drive?”

Adam eyed him warily for a long moment, already knowing both what his answer _should_ be—something about airbags and car safety and morning classes and “we haven’t even spoken in half a week, Lynch”— and what it probably _would_ be.

“Drive where?”

***

Before this week, the last time that someone else had driven Ronan’s BMW was also the last time that Ronan had been home: the morning of his eighteenth birthday, just over a year ago. He’d dragged Gansey out of bed at dawn and clocked the thirty minute drive from Monmouth to the Barns in just over twenty, hardly processing the green hills and dense fog, his mind thrumming with just the one purpose: to go home.

He’d pulled into an endless, skidding arc across the gravel driveway and had flung himself out the door before the engine even cut, reckless impatience and dizzying vertigo leaving him tilted slightly off of his own axis.

No one had ever accused him of caution or deliberation, but that day had been one for the books: he’d exploded through the house, barely enjoying any of it in his delirious greed to enjoy _all_ of it—bounding through the kitchen and the bedrooms, smoothing his hands over every object, dream or real, desperate to commit it to memory— but his pulse had stopped in time with his heels when he’d finally found his mother, her lovely face passive in endless sleep, her reclined body connected to a horror of IVs and feeding tubes.

While his father’s death was a concrete, irrefutable truth, the memory branded in his mind like a scab he’d never stop picking, his mother’s coma had always been an abstract, deniable thing, a far cry from the finality of _death_. But on his eighteenth birthday, the blatant reality of it all hit him like a freight train, like one of Declan’s punches straight to the gut—and that’s when he’d trashed the place, only leaving when Gansey had calmly dragged him out and shoved him into the passenger seat.

It was months later, when a nightmare tossed him into a terrifying inversion of that same day, that Ronan realized the truth he’d buried from even himself. It was so obvious, in hindsight—a half dozen barns full of warm, breathing, un-living, undead animals, a mother lost to a years’ long sleep, a reckless, exuberant father whose entire world stretched from his own fingertips.

Niall Lynch’s whole life was a dream, from his home to his car to his unexplained months away, and Ronan wasn’t all that surprised that he’d made his family a dream, too. He just wasn’t sure where that put him. If his father had struggled to find a place in the waking world, what chance did Ronan have?

And that was where Adam came in. Saturday would be his first day back at the Barns in over a year, and he wasn’t looking forward to an audience of four watching his every move. He wanted to reacquaint himself with his home carefully and slowly to make up for lost time… but going back truly _alone_ seemed unsettling. Hence, Adam.

“I can actually _feel_ you staring at me,” Adam snapped. He glanced quickly across the center console and leveled Ronan with a stern look.

“Just making sure you don’t fuck up a shift,” Ronan said.

His phone chirped from somewhere under his seat, but for the first time in over a week, he allowed himself to ignore it. If Gansey was really that worried, he could just check in with Adam. The Barns was not a place for phones.

“You keep complaining, Lynch, but you’re the one who said I should drive.”

Ronan sneered, but secretly he was grateful for Adam's irritation. As long as they could still argue, it meant Ronan hadn’t ruined everything. He knew they had about a dozen things to sort out—or maybe just the one big thing in particular, but he was fine avoiding it for as long as Adam wanted. As long as they could still do _this_ , Ronan didn’t care about the details.

Instead, his mind was snagged on something else.

“Your dad’s an asshole.”

Adam let out a humorless laugh. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But that wasn’t so bad. Could’ve been worse.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, because there was nothing else to say. How someone could acknowledge a lifetime of violence so calmly was unfathomable. Adam should be furious _,_ should have fought back for years and left home still swinging. Instead he was self-contained and unemotional, and Ronan both hated and admired it. It just didn't seem like _enough,_ but he kept silent on the matter. Adam would have no patience for this train of thought.

They settled into a few quiet minutes, and then Adam spoke.

“How’d you figure out about your mom?” he asked.

Ronan just snorted. “You’ll see, man.”

***

The drive from campus to Singer’s Falls was the kind of beautiful that Adam had craved all his life, the complete opposite of the miles of dirt and dry brush that surrounded his parents’ home, and he wished he wasn’t too preoccupied with clutch pedals and gear shifts to fully appreciate it. The farther they drove from campus, the more the valley folded up on itself, transforming rapidly into rolling hills dotted with rust-colored trees and golden brush and layers of impossibly deep greens. Even the _sky_ became more textured, the afternoon overcast breaking into churning thunderheads and a veil of far-away rain covers. It was something of a dream, and Adam had half a mind to pull over and let Ronan drive. But a quick glance at Ronan, relaxed back in his seat and scanning the landscape, was enough to keep Adam behind the wheel.

Ronan nudged his elbow to signal their exit, and Adam drove along an unused road until it narrowed into a dirt path. The land opened up again, giving way to a smattering of old barns and sheds, and Adam struggled to reconcile the scene with what he’d envisioned. He’d imagined “the Barns” to be a euphemism for a sprawling estate replete with a white-picket-fence mansion and tidy courtyards and an army of glossy cars and carefully maintained landscaping—the kind of austere, impersonal wealth that Ronan’s dorm room spoke of.

Instead, Adam pulled the BMW into a careful stop outside of what appeared to be an enormous old farmhouse. It was undeniably the product of money but it was also lived-in and familiar, the roof weathered and the paint cracked, the driveway unpaved and the land unkempt. It was a wild, unapologetic thing, rebuilt and repaired and expanded in varying degrees of effort and style, and Adam realized his error. Only a place like this could raise a person like Ronan Lynch. Anything less would have stamped out something vital in him.

Ronan was out the door before Adam had even unbuckled his seatbelt, and he intentionally took his time cutting the engine and locking the car so as to give Ronan some privacy. Just before he slid out, he heard the distinctive chirp of a cell phone that wasn’t his, and he scrabbled under the seats until he found it. Ronan wouldn't want it, anyway—for some inexplicable reason he hated his phone— so Adam just gave it a quick glance to make sure the number wasn’t Gansey’s before closing up the car.

The door was left ajar but Adam just hovered at the threshold. Even after years of disuse, the house had a presence to it, a distinct character and personality that Adam was reluctant to interfere with. After a few moments of deliberation, Ronan skidded into view, somehow already barefoot and slightly less kempt than he’d been in the car, and scoffed at him.

“Close the fucking door, Parrish, it’s freezing.” He waited for Adam to step fully inside, then jerked his head toward a hallway. “I’ll be right back, but uh—make yourself at home, or whatever.”

In Ronan's absence, Adam took the time to survey the room. It was even more impressive than the exterior, warm and welcoming despite all the horrors associated with it. It was a collection of mismatched doorknobs and furniture and tapestries and appliances and paint, and every surface was covered in picture frames and throw pillows and childhood art. It wasn't the abundance or the expense of the things that struck Adam, it was the sentiment behind them. They were the kinds of things that made four walls into a home.

He walked through the kitchen, touching nothing but automatically cataloging all the dream things—phones that plugged into nothing, coffee pots that squawked “good morning!” when he passed, dish towels that radiated warmth. All of it was magical, surreal, unfit for the mundane world it was hidden in—but if the house noticed Adam’s plain, dusty upbringing, it was polite enough to ignore it.

After more than a forty-five minutes, Adam heard Ronan’s footsteps through the house, calmer and more subdued than earlier. He padded into the kitchen, his bare feet pale and childish against his ripped black skinny jeans, and then picked up the clock that Adam had been watching. In the center of a very complicated set of gears and dials that spun in no discernible pattern, it said, in ancient, heavily scripted numbers, the current year.

Finally Ronan set it down and looked at Adam and asked, “Wanna see my mom?”

Adam nodded, and an hour and four barns full of sleeping animals later, he understood the still, suspended limbo that was the Barns, and Ronan’s loneliness knitted its way through his own.

***

Ronan and his brothers had spent countless lazy hours arguing over the matter, but the real truth was that Singers Falls was _always_ beautiful, regardless of the season. There were blinding summer days that gave way to endlessly long golden evenings and there were fresh spring days when the entirety of the Falls came alive, the rolling hills exploding with green and more green. There were dark, sleepy winter mornings that blended into even darker, sleepier afternoons— and then there was autumn, when the entire world was painted in golds and reds and the sky flickered through its last bit of energy before the white stillness of winter.

With damp grass beneath him and a sprawling sky above him, Ronan was pleased to note that, in this regard at least, not much had changed at all. At least he still had this.

He'd all but flung himself to the earth when they’d stepped outside, but Adam was still stiffly hovering in a crouch so as not to get his jeans dirtied by the wet soil. The Barns was no place for that kind of practicality, but Ronan would make an exception just this once. He pushed himself back up into a standing position and grabbed at Adam’s arms.

“What the hell—” Adam startled.

“C’mon, man.”

Ronan tugged him up, and a few minutes later they were settling onto the roof, Adam studying the sky while Ronan studied him. Sunsets at the Barns were ethereal things, passionate oranges and reds bleeding into pinks and soothing purples. On a logical level, he knew it was just a trick of physics, the sun pushing its way through the dripping sky as it teetered on the edge of a storm. On a more fundamental level, he felt it was magic. He tried to picture what it would be like to see all of this for the first time, and he just hoped Adam saw it in the same way.

“It’s nice,” Adam said, gesturing vaguely between the house and the sheds. “All of it.”

“Please, this was my castle.” Ronan scoffed, hoping that derision would mask sincerity. It was too much—being home again, realizing how little and how much had changed, seeing his mom, desperately wanting to touch someone when he knew he probably shouldn’t. “It’s fucking beautiful.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “And your mom’s pretty,” he said, but it came out like _priddy._

“Yeah, she was,” Ronan agreed.

 _“Is,”_ Adam corrected _._ He was quiet for a moment, but when he turned back to Ronan he had that same analytical, determined look that Gansey sometimes had. “Do you think Gansey’s right? About the energy source?”

"I don't know," Ronan groaned. Gansey and ley lines were about the last thing he wanted to think about right now. “Why?”

“Because,” Adam began, shifting so he was sitting cross-legged beside Ronan. “Because if he’s right, if it’s based on energy—if we found the source, couldn't we reverse what happened to her?”

Ronan froze, confused, but once he realized the implications and what Adam was suggesting, he had to fight to stamp down the liquid hope blooming in his chest. There was absolutely no reason to think what Adam said was possible, plausible, feasible—and even if it _was_ a potential, they had no leads.

So he just scoffed and shifted his gaze up to the sky, and was grateful when Adam dropped it. Ronan lied back and watched the colors bleed, and after a few minutes Adam settled down beside him.

Not ten minutes later, Ronan heard the deep, even breathing of someone who was decidedly asleep, and he bit back a huff. _Only Adam_ …

“Jesus Christ, Parrish, did you actually pass out during a fucking sunset?” Ronan asked, nudging his foot with his own.

“Oh, shit…” Adam sat up slowly, scanning the sky and the hills and then Ronan, his eyes a little bleary and his hair a little messy.

It was still light out but just barely, and Adam looked sleepy and soft and _warm_ , and Ronan wanted to touch him. 

Instead, he forced himself to be content with just watching, memorizing Adam's golden lashes and his furrowed brows, and he flicked through the last two months of knowing him.

Two months was almost nothing, but Ronan knew how little time actually mattered. His life was a series of mere snapshots that he could never un-see— his mother’s feeding tubes, his father’s funeral, headlights and a guardrail, ripped wrists and an ocean of blood— and two months was more than enough for this.

But then Adam checked his watch and groaned, and his words broke Ronan's train of thought. “Oh, shit. We should probably head back.”

Ronan didn't agree, but he said “yeah,” and a brief struggle for the keys left Ronan in the driver’s seat and the Barns in his rear-view mirror.

And then his phone chirped again.

***

Adam could understand why Ronan was mad—in fact, if he were Ronan he would have been _more_ mad, viciously angry and indignant— but he really couldn’t understand Gansey’s anger. Ronan was just leaned against the wall, his fury a silent, deadly simmer, while Gansey was pacing, his fingers tangling his hair into frustrated tufts, his wireframes long since tossed to the desk.

He looked like an angry father from a TV show, belatedly lecturing his children about broken curfews or stolen alcohol, but Adam thought this was more Ronan’s fight.

“How could you forget to lock the door?” Gansey asked, his voice steadily rising. “Much of my research is irreplaceable, and all your electronics combined are worth a small fortune. For God’s sake, this is a _college campus—_ ”

Ronan launched himself almost violently off the wall. “I swear to God I fucking locked the door, Dick—Parrish, didn’t I lock the fucking door?”

Adam flipped back through the day and latched onto a solid image of Ronan swearing at the door as he struggled with the old lock. When the key had finally turned, he’d kicked it both for good measure and to show it who was boss. Adam was certain it had been secured shut.

“Yeah. Ronan locked the door.”

Adam stepped farther inside the room and surveyed the damage. Gansey’s side was untouched, the piles of paperwork and textbooks and strange mechanical devices still exactly where Adam had left them—but Ronan’s was chaos. It wasn’t _trashed_ , exactly, as that would imply that things had been removed or damaged—it was just… _doubled._

Next to every single object stood an identical twin, an exact replica: shoved on top of his bulky stereo was an equally bulky stereo, tossed across his glossy laptop was yet another glossy laptop, neatly lined up next to Ronan’s dirty boots were another pair, the leather worn raw in all the right places, the hardware perfectly scuffed. Ronan didn’t have that many belongings, but it was the same for everything—every pen, every textbook, every set of headphones. The only thing that stood alone was Chainsaw’s cage.

“You’re acting like this was a random fucking burglary, Gansey.” Ronan gestured at the room, kicking a duplicate coat at the wall. Or was it the original? Adam realized _that_ was where the true violation lie: it would now be impossible to separate out which items were mere dreams, and which Ronan had owned for years. Ronan's voice was seething, but it wasn’t directed at anyone in this room. “You know exactly what this is.”

Gansey began to speak, but he broke off irritably Ronan’s phone chirped again. Adam had shoved it into his pocket when he left the car, intending to give it to Ronan on their way up the stairs. Everything had been forgotten, though, when Adam had picked up his own phone and a frantic, angry Gansey had told them to get home.

Adam pulled out the phone and offered it to Ronan, but he dismissed it with a wave. Adam took that as permission to check it himself.

There were four texts, all from the same unknown number, all identical except for the final one:

 _next lesson_  
_next lesson_  
_next lesson_  
_it starts now_


	10. The Feast

It was the peak of sunset when Adam clocked out of his afternoon shift, and for the first time in maybe forever, he actually noticed it. Usually his mind was swirling with the practical, too busy weighing homework against exhaustion, meal points against hunger, to notice anything about the lighting beyond simply what time it was. But the Barns had reset something vital in him, an old hunger he’d long-ago tamped down, a craving for something _more_ than just studying and working and squeezing sleep somewhere in between. Those things were fundamentally necessary, but it’s possible they weren’t the main point of it all. It was like what Blue had said: _so, I guess magic’s real?_ Magic _was_ real—the Barns was tangible proof of it—and even if he didn’t have access to it in the same way Ronan did, he still wanted to witness it.

So he did. He took the trek home with his eyes trained upwards, counting the colors and grateful that the route was automatic by now: a series of steps down into the park at the center of campus, a set of paths through and around the thick foliage of ancient trees, a wobbling bridge across Campus Drive, and a staircase up to his floor. He felt ownership over it in a way he’d never felt back at home, and he loved it. The high school library, his parents’ trailer, Boyd’s garage—none of those belonged to him, none of those were suited for him. That was something he’d told himself back then, too, but he hadn’t fully believed it until he’d settled into life here. When you’re born into dirt, it’s easy to mistake it for quicksand.

But this… a few dozen students dotting the walkways, the quiet buzzing of campus before a holiday weekend, the crisp November air… _this_ is what Adam was suited for, even on the worst days. Even on afternoons spent buried under essays or mornings when customers at work were particularly rude—or nights spent idly considering what exactly Ronan meant by avoiding Adam.

Because, aside from in the sleepy fourth floor of Humanities Hall, where their Writing class met for three hours a week, Adam hadn’t seen or heard from Ronan for thirteen days.

As far as explosive fall outs went, the night of Kavinsky’s texts hadn’t been so terrible. Adam had slipped away in the chaos, leaving just as Ronan gritted his teeth and began making sense of his side of the room, unwilling to get caught in the crossfire of his and Gansey’s fight. He’d intended to sleep, but the night was spent in a half-awake daze, part of him waiting for another frantic phone call from Gansey. _Ronan’s missing, the BMW’s gone, I’m sure he’s left to find Kavinsky._

The call had never come, their weekend trip had been canceled on Friday with one curt text from Gansey – _postponing ley lines; Ronan too busy plotting murder—_ and Adam had never heard any resolution on the matter.

But somehow the thirteen days had slipped forward rapidly, and it was already the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Noah had left early in the morning, bubbling with excitement about a myriad of relatives and dishes, most of which Adam had never heard of, and gushing about how he “had, like, a month’s worth of laundry to do, and an entire mini-fridge that needed restocking.” The rest of the group would be trickling off campus today, too, and while Gansey had invited him over and over to Thanksgiving in D.C., Adam was looking forward to a still, blissful four-day weekend to himself. He already had a plan: a whole lot of coffee and a detailed summary of chapters 17- 22 of _Introduction to the Political Sciences._

It would be a weekend of normalcy.

***

Despite all the dreaming he had done, Ronan was tired _._ Or maybe he was tired _because_ of all the dreaming, but that hardly made sense either.

In a matter of years Ronan’s own father had dreamt a car, a wife, an entire world, and in only a matter of hours, Kavinsky had dreamt an exact replica of Ronan’s room—but after two weeks of relentless dreaming, all Ronan could show for himself was a small pile of useless crap, only deemed successful insofar as they at least weren’t mutated dream demons sent to kill himself and Gansey. There’d been no strangely communicative forest, no eerily familiar hoofed girl, no improved control over what he could bring back.

Once the initial fury had burned itself out, Kavinsky’s prank had had the desired effect: Ronan wanted answers. It didn’t hurt that two hours into frantically sorting through all his stuff, he finally realized that Kavinsky had left one small, arrogant _K_ emblazoned on each of his products, effectively rendering the whole thing benign if not annoying and invasive. It was unsettling to think how Kavinsky had slipped in, handled all his belongings, and straddled the line between dreams and reality for hours without being noticed. But all of Ronan’s truly personal belongings were safely kept at the Barns, and jealousy outweighed anger.

All he cared about was that he wanted that next lesson, he wanted those pills, he wanted that kind of mastery over his mind. But Ronan Lynch did not deal in favors and debt, and even if he did, it was clear Kavinsky wasn’t doing this out of the kindness of his heart. Ronan had only recently slipped free from Gansey’s parental leash; swapping it for chains was not exactly ideal. So Ronan had given himself until the end of the month. If he figured things out by then, he’d erase Kavinsky from his life. If he didn’t…

He'd therefore devoted the last two weeks to dreaming, constantly and incessantly, and he was _tired_. It was no small miracle that Gansey had managed to drag him to class most days and the cumulative fatigue was finally catching up to him here, at this strange political event the Ganseys had labeled "Thanksgiving."

Thanksgiving at the Gansey home was a blend of golds and browns, candles and fireplaces, chatter and holiday music—but after growing up with Thanksgivings at the Barns, Ronan thought it was about as warm and inviting as a movie set _._ It was a montage of suits and dresses, heels and shiny watches, gelled hair and perfect curls; it was a montage of fake laughter and feigned interest, impossibly small finger food and inedible fruit dishes, good intentions but superficial kindness.

After three years, it seemed Mr. and Mrs. Gansey had deemed Ronan an inevitable if unfavorable part of Gansey’s life, and they kept their critiques of him under slightly thicker veils now, surfacing only in quick asides like, “oh, Ronan, dear, you really _should_ grow your hair, it’d look so much more profess—” which were interrupted time and again by Gansey’s throat-clearing. Ronan didn’t mind, though; their disapproval meant he was on the right track.

And despite his presidential smile and perfect manners, Ronan could tell Gansey was suffering just about as much as he was, and he liked him better for it. This wasn’t Gansey’s world, and someday he’d be king of his own.

When dinner finally came around, Ronan disregarded the seating arrangements in favor of sitting beside Gansey at the enormous wooden table. There was no way he was sitting ten chairs away, squeezed between a politician and a PR rep, and after one nearly-awkward beat, Mrs. Gansey conceded graciously. The feast was served, and Ronan had one brief moment of gratitude at himself for suffering through the afternoon because _this_ was why he’d come—no one did Thanksgiving dinner better than the Ganseys did, probably because no one could afford it like the Ganseys could—before Gansey himself broke the spell.

“I wish Adam had come,” he said, sighing dramatically. He shifted uneasily in his seat, thumbing at an un-drunk glass of wine, and looked, for the first time all night, miserable. “He’s never said as much, but I don’t think he likes being home. Or am I wrong? Tell me, how did he seem when you were back in his town?”

Ronan’s world tilted slightly—he couldn't fault Adam for refusing a weekend with more than one Dick Gansey, but it hadn’t occurred to him that Adam would go _home._ Ronan didn’t know firsthand, but he could only guess that four days was a very long time with someone like Robert Parrish. He wasn’t sure how long Adam could maintain his quiet strength when he'd so visibly deflated after only five minutes in Boyd’s garage.

For Gansey’s sake, Ronan tried to keep his voice low and even. “His dad’s a bastard.” Gansey looked up, startled, but waited for elaboration. Ronan knew it wasn’t his secret to tell—but if he had any say in it, Adam was a permanent fixture in their group and that meant Gansey should at least know the basics. But there was no correct way to say it; no sentence could do it justice, no words could be true enough. “The guy hit him, Gansey. A lot, I think.”

Ronan hated how flippant it sounded, realizing it didn’t do enough to convey the way Adam’s fingers had tightened around the grease rag. But it was enough for Gansey; he stiffened for a moment before tossing his napkin on the table and pushing his chair away. “I’ll call him,” he said. “I’ll get him tonight. He’ll stay here this weekend.”

“Wait, fuck—” Ronan tugged him back into his seat, panicking vaguely. He wasn’t sure if Adam would ever trust him again if he knew he’d told Gansey, but if Adam _had_ gone home, he wasn’t sure that it mattered. “Fucking calm down. Just let me text him first.”

Gansey raised an eyebrow. “You know how to do that?”

“Asshole.” Ronan scowled, but he typed out a message so quickly he forgot his trademark snark. _hows thanksgiving?_

Ronan hadn’t been very worried before, as he tended not to deal in the abstract. If Adam hadn’t said he was going home, there was no reason to think he had; if Adam hadn’t called to say that there was something wrong, there was no reason to think there was.

But one minute turned to two and then twenty, and Ronan waited and waited, and eventually he was pulled back into the swirling world of small talk and gravy, unease brewing quietly in his gut. By the time the table had cleared and the crowd had divided into two archaically gendered groups— the men trailing into the study for cigars and the women perching in the sitting room with tea—Ronan was burning with restless energy. It was only 9 p.m. and the drive from D.C. to Adam’s hometown was a 2.5 hours that he could easily cut it down to 2, but once he got there how would he even know which trailer park  was his? Which trailer? He’d have to search them all.

Almost against his will, Ronan was pulled into a light hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Ronan, dear, you’re staying this weekend, yes? Gansey can show you your room.”

Ronan bit out an awkwardly formal “thank you” and let Gansey guide him down the enormous hall of guest rooms. They were in the middle of planning the night, debating whose car could get Adam more quickly, when Ronan’s phone finally chirped. Never in his life had he checked his phone so fast, but it took him a moment to process the message. He’d been expecting words, but it was a grainy, shitty photo of what seemed to be Adam’s dorm desk, every inch covered by textbooks and notes.

Even as relief washed over him, another thought crept in.

***

Thanksgiving was something of an abstract concept to Adam, something he’d maybe enjoy in theory but couldn’t quite fathom. It was hard enough just to imagine an ordinary meal with both of his parents— the three of them crammed around their tinny little table, exchanging small talk or comfortable silence, genuinely pleased with one another’s company— let alone a _holiday_ meal. Holidays in the Parrish trailer were simmering, dangerous things. They served as stark reminders to both of his parents of horrible days they’d endured as children, days they’d been hell-bent on replicating for Adam. It was holidays more than regular days which had produced in Adam something that wasn’t quite fear but maybe an echo of it, a cruel Pavlovian response to the promise of unrestrained emotion, the kind that had raised Adam, the kind that still flowed through his own veins. The kind that had long ago molded all of his instincts.

If someone raised their voice, Adam figured out the right words to say. If someone drew back their fist, Adam planned which angle would cause less damage. If someone tossed a beer bottle at the wall, Adam covered his eyes and hoped for some luck.

Much of these reflexes were gifted to him on Christmases and birthdays, Thanksgivings and New Years, and while he knew that Gansey holidays were a world apart, they still didn’t hold much appeal. But the day had passed in easy solitude; he’d already made it to chapter 20 in his notes, he had a small stockpile of ramen noodles waiting for him, and all in all it was by far the best Thanksgiving he’d ever had.

It was well past eleven, and Adam was slowly tidying up his desk space when a sharp knock startled him into a flinch. As far as he could tell, the entire hall had been empty—in the entire hour he’d spent studying in the hall kitchen, not one other student had passed through.

Warily, Adam pulled open the door, but it took him a moment to process the image before him. He’d been expecting a Resident Advisor or maybe a maintenance crew, but instead it was Ronan, his arms precariously balancing about a dozen trays while Chainsaw perched haphazardly on his shoulder. Ronan, who hadn’t so much as looked at Adam in two weeks.

“Parrish.” Ronan jerked his chin in greeting, then proceeded to push his way through the door and drop the pile of what seemed to be casseroles and half-loaves of bread and some very intricate meat dishes onto the desk. Chainsaw pecked hopefully at the mess, but Ronan shooed her away.

“Ronan? You look…” _Good._ Despite the lengths he’d clearly gone to make himself as disheveled as possible, Ronan was dressed uncharacteristically well in slacks and dress shoes and even a belt. He was head-to-toe black, from the tie that hung loosely around his open collar to the wisps of tattoo curling up his neck to the enormous watch that showed through his open sleeve cuffs. The only bit of color was a silky dress shirt that bared an uncanny resemblance to the BMW’s glossy charcoal, and his usual stack of leather wristbands. Adam didn’t know where he’d been going with the sentence, so he settled on “…different.”

Ronan looked down and scoffed, then tore his tie the rest of the way off. “I was told last year that jeans and boots were—” he tossed up air quotes, “ _indecent attire for a holiday dinner._ ”

“Ah,” Adam said, because he didn’t know what else to say. And because he was suddenly painfully aware of his threadbare grey sweats, his thick holey socks, his oversized white tee shirt. “Why are you…” he gestured vaguely around the room, trying to focus, “uh— here? I mean, not at Gansey’s?”

“Rude,” Ronan snorted. He ripped open a few of the trays and tossed a plastic fork to Adam before settling on the ground against the wall. Around a mouthful of green beans, Ronan said, “Eat, man, I swear this is only like 1% of what they had left.”

“I don’t—” Adam startled when Ronan wrapped his fingers around Adam’s wrist, tugging him to the ground beside him while pressing a dish into Adam’s hands. “God, you’re so _pushy_ ,” Adam grumbled.

Ronan flashed a cheery sneer then dug back into his food. How someone could go off the radar for two weeks then show up unannounced, force their way into someone’s room, and then toss themselves onto the floor and devour half a green bean casserole without a word of explanation was beyond Adam. But he conceded defeat and tried a tiny slice of some gravy-covered meat, and he could silently admit that maybe ramen noodles weren’t his favorite, and maybe he’d actually been very hungry—and maybe this was delicious _._

When Adam looked up after a few bites, Ronan was already watching him. It was so quiet it should have been awkward, but all Adam felt was… _it._ Whatever one-sided thing had been brewing between them, whatever possibility had been severed by the regretted kiss, it hung by a thread between them now. They might not have spoken in two weeks, but Adam couldn’t look at Ronan now and not see the way he’d gently held his sleeping mother's hand or carelessly toppled barefoot into the grass like a child. Seeing Ronan at the Barns was a line Adam couldn’t uncross, but he was pretty sure—

“Did you know 240 million turkeys were killed for this damn holiday?” Ronan smirked, shoving another massive forkful of green beans in his mouth. He gestured at Adam’s dish. “Might as well eat. Can’t let their sacrifice be for nothing.”

It was enough to break the mood and Adam sighed. Maybe there hadn’t even _been_ a mood. But they always were better at banter, anyway, and he could play along.

"Always a charmer, Lynch."

“Whatever. I'm just trying to save your stubborn ass from starvation.”

Adam laughed. "Wow, thanks so much. And they say chivalry's dead, but," he tried on Gansey’s grand, affected Virginia accent, “I’m positively _swooning_ —”

"Asshole." Ronan narrowed his eyes, a slight flush creeping up his neck. Baiting Ronan was like playing with fire—one misstep could find you charred. But Adam couldn’t help himself; Ronan made it too easy, and usually they kept it just this side of truly fighting. “You know, Parrish, if I’d wanted to talk to a dick, I’d just call Gansey—”

“That would imply you knew how to use a phone.”

“Texted you, didn’t I?”

Adam rolled his eyes but settled back against the wall next to Ronan, their shoulders touching and their elbows occasionally bumping, and resigned himself. Maybe tonight wasn’t a night for his endless questions— why have you been avoiding me? why are you here now? why did you cancel the weekend in Henrietta? what did you do about Kavinsky? are we ever gonna talk about that one... _incident_?— but he could save them all until tomorrow. For now, he let himself be happy with Gansey’s food and Ronan’s company.

Chainsaw hopped over, settling in the space between Ronan's and Adam’s legs, and began nipping at the already worn seam of Adam’s sweats. They were his warmest pair, but he couldn’t really find it in himself to shoo her away.

When Ronan noticed, he exhaled something between a snort and a laugh and waved her off. Around a mouthful of food, he said two words Adam was pretty sure he’d never been told before.

“’Appy Fanksgiffing, Parrish.”

***

After weeks of uncertainty, his sleeping and waking lives blending into a complicated patchwork of reality and frustration, Ronan breathed in the evening air and finally knew with absolute clarity that he was asleep. He could actually _feel_ the dream as he shaped it; it was a tenuous thing, but so long as he grasped the reigns, he could stop it from becoming a nightmare. 

And now that he was there, firmly and knowingly embedded in this other world, he could see the variable that had been missing since the crash—it was so glaringly obvious, it was almost ridiculous.  Because there she sat, her hoofed legs dangling off the edge of the Barns’ porch, a smattering of wildflowers on her lap. He’d only become cognizant of her in Kavinsky’s forest, but had she been there before? Always? A flash of hooves, wide eyes, bright blonde hair... She’d seemed familiar even before he’d become fully aware of her, but he couldn’t decide where the loop began—had he manifested her, or had she always been on the fringes, a beacon who helped differentiate realities? Did it matter?

“For Adam,” she said in English, handing him a dozen small white flowers laced together to form a bracelet.

Ronan just stared at it. “The hell would Adam do with this?” Saying Adam’s name out loud—did it count as out loud if it was a dream?—felt strange, his tongue getting snagged on the _d._ But Ronan didn’t know what to make of that, especially as his thoughts gave way to suspicion. Deep, deep suspicion. “Wait—how do you know about him?”

She ignored him, and Ronan forced himself to summon some patience. As far as he could tell, she was just a kid. A very annoying kid, one he may or may not have dreamed up, one who apparently knew Ronan’s feelings for Adam and was choosing to encourage them with, of all things, a damn _bracelet_.

“Fine,” he snapped. “You got a name?”

The girl just shrugged, her gaze turned down to another string of flowers. This one was impossibly small and a bit rattier, the stems looping around a hazardous collection of little twigs. As she got nearer to closing the circle she wrapped it around her left hoof.

“No name, huh? Parents? Anyone?” She shrugged again, a satisfied smile blooming as she shook her hoof and the flowers and twigs stayed secured in place. “I’m gonna call you Orphan Girl, then.” Ronan eyed her warily, realizing only after the fact that the name might be offensive.

“You don’t have parents, either,” she hummed, wrapping her fingers like measuring tape around Ronan’s wrist, over the leather bands. It tickled; for all he worried about Adam’s aversion to touch, Ronan was pretty starved for it himself.

“Yeah.” Ronan said, because it was pointless trying to understand how she knew these details. “Listen—you know those are gonna die, right? They’re gonna fall apart. You’re wasting your time.”

Something began echoing through the dream like footsteps or a drummer’s beat, something steady and insistent, faint at first but rapidly building in intensity, making the edges of this world blur and shake. The dream stretched thinner, and unease thrummed through his veins.

Orphan Girl ignored him, deftly lacing another handful of flowers together. She held out a hand for Ronan’s wrist and scowled when he didn’t comply, the expression far too familiar. Ronan was no stranger to staring contests—he was often both instigator and victor—but there was no winning against this girl. When he finally gave her his arm, she carefully secured the flowers, braiding them through and around his bracelets. It looked out of place, tiny wildflowers filling the gaps between leather and scars, and his only consolation was that when he woke up they’d either be gone or they’d die soon thereafter.

“No they won’t,” Orphan Girl said, pressing the one meant for Adam firmly in his palm. “You dreamed them. They won’t die.”

Ronan remained skeptical, but the repetitive beating got louder, and this time he heard a voice, male and imploring. Orphan Girl seemed unconcerned, but she did pull her hand away.

“ _Wake up,_ ” she whispered, and Ronan did.

It took him a moment to process his surroundings—he was slumped on the floor against the wall with a blanket that smelled like fresh laundry draped awkwardly from his shoulders to his toes, his stupid dress shoes stacked neatly beside him and his tie carefully draped over the back of a chair. It was less a sense of processing his surroundings than it was being flooded with just the one word: _Adam._

The same persistent noise from his dream began again, and this time he understood it for what it was: Adam knocking on his own dorm door, calling for Ronan to wake up. Ronan groaned and stood, tossing the blanket onto Adam’s bed, and the motion pulled his shirt sleeve up. When he saw it, shame coursed through him. Tangled through his leather bands were the flowers, and no amount of tugging could pull them free. They were secured like a shackle, immovable and unbreakable, and clenched in his fingers was the other one, the one Orphan Girl had made for Adam.  _Flowers?_ Might as well have woken up clutching a notarized confession.

“Wake _up,_ Ronan. I left my keys in there—” Adam’s voice was muffled, and he cut himself off to jiggle at the doorknob. Panicking, Ronan pocketed the one bracelet and pulled his sleeve over the other, then silently flipped the lock open, waiting for Adam to try the handle again. “Oh, shit—” Adam all but spilled forward as the door opened, not expecting it to actually be unlocked. He whirled, confused, then leveled Ronan with a glare. “Asshole,” he scowled, a gesture learned from Ronan himself.

Ronan might have been gearing up to stifle a laugh, but his brain short-circuited as he took in what appeared to be Adam fresh from a shower, little beads of water still collected on the tips of his hair, the hollow of his throat still a little damp. He was rosy-cheeked and wide eyed and, blissfully, fully clothed, but Ronan looked away anyway. A glance at the window told him it was well into morning, overcast and soft.

“Oh, fuck—what time is it? Why didn’t you wake me up last night?”

“How was I supposed to know you wouldn’t wake up with a knife and stab me? I mean, it's clear you’re not a morning person.” Adam smirked happily at Ronan’s scowl. “And uhh…” Adam ran a towel through his hair, casual as ever, and Ronan was vaguely scandalized. “It’s around nine. Commons is closed, but I’ve got Ramen and instant coffee?”

“Fuck that,” Ronan spit out. Adam’s features melted into a frown so quickly, so automatically, it was like they’d been trained for it. Ronan backpedaled. “No, I just mean—” he jangled his keys. “I think we can do better than that.”

One corner of Adam’s mouth turned up, cautiously hopeful. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I just gotta…” Ronan gestured down at himself and his stupidly wrinkled slacks and button-down, suddenly very aware of things like showers and toothpaste. “I’ll be back.”

***

When they'd finally gotten through the halls and out into the parking lot, Adam froze mid-step so suddenly that Ronan actually heard the scrape of shoe against asphalt. Adam Parrish did not scrape his soles—that was the kind of shit he was always nagging Ronan against—and the sound caught his attention. When he looked up, following Adam’s gaze, a residual shot of adrenaline trilled through him, an automated response to the promise of speed. It was the same feeling as watching a red light turn green.

“Wow, Parrish, that’s sweet.” Kavinsky was leaned against the driver’s side of the BMW, a headlight swinging casually from left hand to right and then back. His smirk only deepened as his eyes raked down Ronan’s frame and then Adam’s. Ronan wanted to step in front of Adam, to block Kavinsky’s line of sight, but it wasn’t his place. “You always walk Lynch back to his car the morning after?”

Adam just glared at him silently, and Ronan couldn’t decide if it was the implication that Adam resented or just Kavinsky in general. He was more concerned about the BMW. It looked fine, except for the headlight that was decidedly not in its socket, but he hardly trusted Kavinsky with it.

“Why the fuck are you here?” Here, on campus and not at home. Here, at the freshmen dorms instead of in his apartment across campus. Here, somehow perfectly knowledgeable that Ronan had come back last night, had left his car in exactly this parking lot.

“Proko’s trying to get us a freshman recruit.” He grinned widely. “Came to get him last night, saw a car that looked oddly familiar.”

“What did you do?” Ronan practically growled it.

“The question is, what _didn’t_ I do?” Kavinsky laughed, flinging open the driver’s side door and bracing himself against the frame. He gestured toward the interior with a grand sweep of his arm. “Or is it: what didn’t _Parrish_ do?”

Ronan hazarded a glance inside the cabin of the car, preparing to see more destruction and ruin, the complete undoing of all of Adam’s work.

Instead… the car was perfect. Every deflated airbag was removed, the gaping holes they’d left behind filled. It no longer looked like the eerie remains of a car wreck—it was _whole_ , the replaced plastic and leather matching the rest of the interior with precision. It didn’t look repaired, it looked like it had never been damaged to begin with.

“Oh,” Adam said. Ronan waited for more, but that’s all there was. Just the briefest of exhales, understanding and… resigned?

“You… fixed it?” Ronan’s voice was a little higher than usual, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. This was insanity, this was impossible. In his peripheral vision, he saw Adam's head jerk to the side at the word _fix._  “You dreamt all this?”

“Yeah, man, Happy Thanksgiving. Headlights, airbags—I said you should patent that shit, man, make millions.” Kavinsky’s smirk gave way to a satisfied grin. “But, guess I got there first.”

“Wait—first my room, then you break into my fucking _car_?” Finally Ronan remembered he should be angry, furious even, that Kavinsky had so invaded his space. But it didn’t ring true; it was more for Adam’s benefit. What he actually felt was desperately impressed. A roomful of belongings Kavinsky could study was one thing; dreaming up airbags he’d never seen to fit into a car he’d never been in was something else entirely. Kavinsky just stared at him, still smiling, and Ronan couldn’t help himself. Curiosity won out. “How’d you do all this?”

Kavinsky just slammed the door and tossed the broken headlight to Adam, who caught it robotically.

“How’d you fucking do it?” Ronan repeated.

The control, the speed; the sheer quantity, the impossible perfection.  All of it.

“Like I said, man…” Kavinsky dipped into the pocket of his black jeans, pulling out one incredibly small, incredibly tantalizing pill. He pinched it between his thumb and index finger, holding it right in front of Ronan’s eyes. “Next lesson.”

Ronan stared at it, entranced.  If the power lay in the pill, then with it he could dream the whole world; he could stop his nightmares before they began.

But then the pill was gone, flung to the ground with a neat flick of Adam’s wrist. When Ronan looked over, he expected to see the same kind of stony impassivity that Adam had shown his father. Instead, Adam's eyes were liquid anger, his hands curled into fists.

Kavinsky stared down at the pill for a moment, his silence serving as a ticking bomb.

And then he laughed.

“You know, Parrish,” he peeled his gaze up to Adam’s face, amusement etched into every feature. He pulled another pill from his pocket. “You’ve really got to stop doing that. Lucky for you, man, they’re unlimited supply. You feel me?”

Ronan heard the edge in Kavinsky’s voice, and he saw the threat there. _Lucky for you_.  Kavinsky’s sanity was a tenuous, brittle thing; he was just one manic smile away from snapping. But if Adam noticed, he didn’t take the warning. He ripped that pill, too, from where it lay casually across Kavinsky’s palm.

“You can keep it up,” Adam agreed, his voice steely and low. “But I’ll keep doing that, every time—”

“But you won’t _be_ there every time, will you?” Kavinsky laughed, shrugging, entirely unconcerned. He backed away, rounding to the other side of the car and smoothing his hands over the paint, possessive and arrogant. “I’m waiting, Lynch.” And then he was gone, weaving through the cars as he crossed the parking lot.

Ronan slid into the driver’s seat automatically, smoothing his hands over the steering wheel, the dashboard, the stick shift, anger and awe twirling together on a precariously fine edge.

He opened the glove compartment without thinking, already knowing what he’d find inside. A part of him was hopeful, doling out the next few days and calculating how many attempts he'd be able to squeeze in before Gansey returned to the dorms.

And then the car rocked slightly as Adam shoved himself into the passenger seat. "Shoulda just asked him to dream you a new car," Adam said, anger rounding out his vowels and shaving off his consonants. "Woulda saved me a lotta trouble."

Ronan didn't know what to say, all attempts at useful communication hindered. He didn't want a new BMW, only this one. He hadn't wanted anyone else to work on his car, only Adam. He didn't care about _what_ Kavinsky had done, only how he'd done it. He'd claw the airbags out right now if he thought he could dream them himself.

Adam pulled a pill from the glove compartment, spinning it between his fingers and testing its weight, and then he leveled Ronan with a long, heavy look. It was nothing like the one from last night, when they'd shared cold leftovers on Adam's bedroom floor and Ronan had grasped for any stupid thing to say to break the tension. This was so much worse, it existed on a different plane. It was like Adam was seeing him for the first time, considering and measuring him anew, and Ronan was wary of what he'd find.

Finally Adam slumped back in his seat, his expression inscrutable, and admitted for probably the first time ever, "I'm hungry, Lynch. Can we just go?"


	11. The Warehouse

On the most immediate level, Ronan knew what he was supposed to do.

He was supposed to ignore the mass of pills threatening to spill out of his glove compartment, ignore the slender fingers spinning and spinning and spinning around a burst of teal, ignore the realization that his steering wheel no longer sagged ever so slightly to the left, the way it had for years and the way he’d imagined it always would, until he’d busted out its airbags and found them replaced overnight. The car had been permanently altered, made undeniably different from the way his father had first created it, and he knew he was just supposed to ignore it.

He was supposed to turn the engine over, get them out of the parking lot, make a left turn away from campus—and then what?

He didn’t know, and he couldn’t very well ask the person stuck in his passenger seat, because all possibilities led to the same bleak outcome: the distinct crumbling of what should have been three entire days spent grasping at excuses to stay holed up in Adam Parrish’s dorm room, making food runs and pretending to work on some Latin.

That version of the weekend was gone, now, and all he could focus on was that his father's car seemed a foreign thing to him. The pedals felt awkward under his feet, the gear shift too far forward—had his seat always been set so low? Ronan didn’t know, and he abruptly wanted it back to the way it'd been last night, coasting easily from D.C. to campus, as familiar as a memory.

It was only when Adam checked his watch for the third time in half as many minutes, sighing irritably and twirling the dream pill in his fingers, that something finally clicked, that the blurry fog of _then what?_ cleared enough for him to make a decision.

“Just call Dick already, Parrish,” he said, wriggling his phone from his pocket and pressing it into Adam’s sternum.

“What?” Adam startled, only just barely catching the slim device before it slid between the seat and center console.

“Richard Campbell Gansey III,” Ronan enunciated, flicking the ignition at last. He saw it, now. They’d get food somewhere, something greasy and ridiculously overpriced that Adam’d very nobly pretend to hate, and by the time they were back, Gansey would be right there in this exact parking lot, probably with Blue and Noah in tow, and he’d have answers, he’d fix it all. The weekend’s plans re-solidified in front of Ronan’s eyes. “Call him.”

“I do have my own phone, you know,” Adam bristled, letting Ronan’s hang limply from his hand.

“That’s great, man,” Ronan said, distracted. He adjusted his rear-view mirrors and raised his headrest. Every single detail was different, somehow, tampered with and made _wrong_ in the very minutest of ways, and it’d take ages to get it all back to the way it used to be. He was never letting the car out of his sight again; he'd sleep in it if he had to. “Use it.”

***

“I don’t get it,” Blue said, dragging unimpressed eyes over the BMW’s shark-like profile from her perch on the curb beside Noah. “The guy breaks into your car, and then what? Takes a nap? Installs some air bags?”

Adam was pretty sure that was the child’s version, abridged and smoothed over. He was pretty sure the reality involved a few more drugs, an entire reframing of the secluded calm of Ronan's visit last night, a staggering degree of finesse and skill that left him badly impressed.

“Good God,” Gansey breathed from the driver’s seat. He ran his fingers over the dashboard again and again, and Adam didn’t understand why Ronan wasn’t right there with him, lovingly cataloguing the details of his now-perfect vehicle. “All these components, all the intricacy. How could he know the dimensions, the appropriate material? Did he just aim to create something that would work, and that request was enough?” He paused to scribble furiously in his leather notebook and then looked up dazedly. “What do you guys think?”

“I _think_ ,” Blue drawled, leaning her head on Noah’s shoulder, the pair huddled close against the November chill. “It’s creepy as hell. And I think the real question is _why_. Why he’d do it.” Gansey gave a little _ah_ as he visibly switched gears, shifting from scholar engrossed to parent concerned. Blue shrugged, gesturing at the front of the car. “Are you sure it’s even safe?”

“Hmm,” Gansey hummed, pointing his finger at Blue in approval. He tied his notebook closed and stretched himself out of the car. “You have a point. Until we know why he fixed it—”

“It didn’t need to be fucking ‘fixed,’” Ronan grumbled, and Adam watched him scrub irritably at his buzzed head in his periphery. “It was perfectly fucking functional before.”

“Yeah,” Adam scoffed, bending into the driver’s side to give the steering wheel’s air bag a flick. “Minus a few key safety features.”

“It ran, didn’t it, which is more than I can say for—”

“You couldn’t even legally drive it at night.” Adam gestured at the new headlights, nestled as perfectly as if they’d been there all along. “Now you can.”

“Right,” Ronan growled, rising from his defensive crouch on the curb, and finally Adam met his angry glare. “Because _that’s_ what I care about.”

Noah’s eyes flickered nervously between them, but Adam didn’t understand. Last night the car wasn’t complete, and now it was. There wasn’t anything else to it, unless Ronan was simply jealous he hadn’t been able to do it himself. They stared at each other, impassive, until Gansey finally spoke.

“Listen. This doesn’t resolve the immediate issue,” he said, eyebrows furrowed and bottom lip tugged between his thumb and forefinger. “But I think we should return to our original plan.”

Ronan’s frustrated eye roll and grunt went unacknowledged. After a millisecond of thought, Noah’s head sprung up, perpetually-tired eyes suddenly bright with excitement. “Road trip?!”

“Road trip?” Blue echoed, confused. She yawned, and Adam shared her sentiment. “Wait, another one?”

After a quick ten minute intermission of duffle-packing and necessities-gathering, which entailed for Adam the collection of several textbooks and his tidy stack of notes, the group reconvened in the parking lot, staring awkwardly between the BMW and the Camaro. They'd never consciously divided their ranks like this, and Adam wasn't sure where it left him.

“Well," Blue said. “Dibs on the car that _wasn’t_ handled by a skeevy drug-addict, then.” She glanced up at Ronan, grimacing apologetically, and Ronan scowled back at her as she dragged Noah toward the Camaro. “No offense, or anything.”

“We can all take the Pig,” Gansey said firmly. “There’s no reason for you to drive that thing before we know if it’s…” He trailed off and sighed when he caught Ronan’s murderous expression. “Right. Okay. Oh! Since we've got the time for it, would you mind if we made a quick stop on the way?”

“A quick stop?” Ronan asked, squinting skeptically at Gansey’s sudden appealing smile and glinty eyes.

“For supplies,” Gansey nodded sagely, tone serious, but his expression was both sheepish and childishly hopeful. If Adam was right, and the original plan had been to head to the Barns, he didn’t understand. He couldn’t recall a single place worth stopping at between here and there, and he couldn’t imagine that somewhere Gansey had even _more_ supplies than everything he’d already brought with him to the dorms. “EMF readers, the rest of my research… that sort of thing.”

Ronan barked a sharp laugh that seemed to startle even himself. “Whatever, man.” He shook his head and slid into the driver’s seat, and Gansey grinned excitedly. “I’ll follow you guys.”

Gansey let out a delighted _woop!_ and tossed himself into his own car, cranking down the windows despite Blue’s mutterings about something she referred to as _optimal spike height._

“Adam?” Gansey called, just as a curt click of Ronan’s tongue had Chainsaw soaring from somewhere around the dorms and cannonballing into a ruffled heap in his passenger seat.

He watched Ronan flick the BMW’s ignition, fiddle with the stereo, chew a wristband, swat Chainsaw away from her determined nibbling at the dashboard. He watched Blue twist around in her claimed seat in the Camaro to chat with Noah, watched Noah pet gently at her hair, watched Gansey wait for them all to be belted in before he started the engine. He watched as Gansey looked at him expectantly, and he watched as Ronan stared at anything but him. He sighed.

It was only a few minutes later, when the bass was sufficiently deafening and the speedometer was up to seventy, that Adam yelled out, “Where are we going?”

Ronan just smirked out the window and drove.

***

From the outside, Monmouth Manufacturing was just about as unimpressive as any other warehouse Adam had seen before in his life, and he’d seen a fair few. It probably ranked somewhere near the bottom, actually, given the unpaved gravel driveway leading up to the boarded-up first floor, the sparse but overly-tall wild grass dotting the patchy land around the place, the precarious sag of the brick building in general, as if it was sleeping, hardly able to bear the weight of its own roof.

He’d heard Ronan’s stories of the place, and it had grown fantastical in his mind—two teenage kings, holed up and tinkering around in the largest, emptiest building they could find, sharing insomniated midnight routines and chasing down Welsh lore, studying, bickering, grabbing sodas from the refrigerator mid-shower, building ramps in their front lawn, chasing the moon.

He’d heard of Aglionby Academy, too, of course: the formidable private school that served as the real corner-stone of the town, far more noteworthy than their dinky civic center or tired main street. That was what really drew people in, made the town more than just a speck of dirt on the map; ostensibly, that was what had pulled Ronan here, and Gansey too. That was what Adam had aspired for, too, and in hindsight he’d only just barely fallen short.

Or maybe he hadn’t fallen short at all; there was a reason his academy had always been paired against Aglionby in lacrosse tournaments, polo matches, rowing competitions. There was a reason the two were often paired together in school rankings, college acceptance statistics, were not-so-jokingly referred to as bitter rivals. He supposed maybe he’d just gotten his own version of Aglionby, which was hardly anything to be ashamed of in the end.

But for all the Acadamy's renown and splendor, the town around it and Monmouth was ordinary enough, the same bleak, dusty flatness that stretched to his parents’. He was pretty sure that half an hour on the one road out of town would lead him straight to the dinky trailer, to Boyd’s, to his father. He wasn’t sure he liked it at all.

But the moment they skidded into the sprawling lot onto which Monmouth was slumped, Gansey had burst out of the Camaro, the most alive Adam had ever seen him, and Ronan was only half a second behind him, the keys still dangling from the BMW’s ignition, Chainsaw screeching on his trail.

They practically raced each other around the building, bounding out of sight, and Adam was confused.

He reached over, shut off the car, and joined Noah and Blue where they stood, equally bewildered, staring up at the building. The first floor alone had to be twenty-five feet high, hollow and abandoned.

Noah whistled. “I thought they’d been exaggerating.”

“Yeah,” Blue agreed. “I never knew anybody lived in this thing, let alone two kids. I’m surprised Gansey didn’t wilt in a place like this.”

“What about Ronan?” Adam scoffed. He looked around, and everything he saw for blocks and blocks was barren, devoid of energy or life. He didn’t understand how someone like Ronan wouldn’t have faded into sepia in a place like this, especially after growing up somewhere as vivid as the Barns. “Gansey would have considered it another adventure. But Ronan?”

“Well,” Noah said, trailing his eyes along the tall trees behind the building to peer up at the sky. “Ronan had Gansey, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Adam breathed, and then a painfully creaky, brown-stained window was cranked open on the second floor, and a flushed Gansey was half-dangling out of it.

“Well, comrades?” he called. “Aren’t you coming?”

Blue squinted up at him. “How are we even supposed to get in?”

A shadow appeared beside Gansey, and then Gansey was tipping forward, nearly launched completely out the window, before he was tugged back in at the last minute by his shoulders. He turned to scowl at Ronan, and Ronan just flashed a wicked smile.

“Through the front door, losers,” Ronan called. “Obviously.”

***

On the inside, Monmouth Manufacturing was different than anything that Adam had ever seen before, could ever even imagine existing. It was sprawling, enormous, and the sheer amount of space from wall to wall should have been overwhelming, impersonal, stark, as bleak as the land around it. But it was nothing like that at all; it was the turbulent, obsessive, brilliant inside of Gansey’s mind, tipped on its side and strewn across the entire second story of an abandoned warehouse, and finally Adam understood: only a place this colossal could even begin to contain something like Gansey.

Ronan launched himself at Noah’s back the second they entered, and Noah crumpled slightly, laughing and sinking quickly under his weight. Gansey jumped in immediately to right them both, scolding Ronan as he went, but Ronan tugged him into the fray and the three of them fell, a tangled six-legged heap of boyishness on the dusty concrete floor.

“Help!” Noah squeaked, buried somewhere under Ronan, who was cackling savagely. “Blue, help me! I’m drowning!”

Blue rolled her eyes and stepped neatly around them, but Adam saw something undeniably close to _fond_ in her expression. He hovered near the door, suddenly feeling intrusive, as Blue pushed her way forward.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered to herself, wading through the mess of boxes scattered about the place, pulling the occasional flap back to peer inside, ignoring the others' scuffle entirely. “This is so completely ridiculous.”

Like something out of a fairytale, brown-tinted light came flooding in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, some of them cracked and held together haphazardly by smatterings of duct tape, and illuminated shards of air showed a million little dust particles on their slow cascade to the ground.

Adam stepped just slightly farther into the space, hovering around the perimeter, and took it all in. There were offices tucked along one wall, strange, ancient machinery shoved against another, ghastly water stains crawling down the wood in the far corner, and somehow it was wonderful.

Blue waved him towards the far wall and he followed, peeking into a few boxes here and there, their contents varied but somehow unified: tangents on research into burial rituals, afterlife ideology, archaic wedding ceremonies, traditional Welsh music. A thick photo album labeled _Peru: Nazca Lines,_ another labeled _UK: Uffington Horse._ Entire boxes labeled Wales, Australia, Montana. It was the cumulative physical evidence of years of Gansey’s obsession bursting out of dozens of boxes, and Adam didn't understand how Gansey ever stood to be away from it all.

Once he’d found a path through the boxes, he crouched to analyze a remarkably detailed cardboard model of what could only be Henrietta, judging by the pristine white vaguely Aglionby-shaped cardboard box surrounded by a pristine green vaguely school-yard shaped lawn. And then there was the large block-shaped building, lovingly constructed on the far side of the model town, replete with painted orangey-brown windows and scabby landscaping and made unmistakable by the tiny, incredibly accurate metal replica of a certain inky BMW parked beside a painted cardboard rendition of a certain orange Camaro.

It was Gansey who extricated himself from the pile of limbs first, and after he’d stood and straightened the collar of his bright blue polo, Adam watched his entire being melt into relaxation as he did a slow, thorough survey of the place with his eyes. He seemed at once younger than usual and older, childishly delighted to be there but also solid, grounded, as if fortified by the sheer _Gansey-_ ness of the warehouse. As intensely as the Barns was Ronan, Monmouth Manufacturing was Gansey. Adam wondered how a place that was entirely his own would look.

“What d’you think?” Ronan asked, sinking down to Adam’s side as Blue moved to look out a window. He picked up the BMW and spun a back wheel, and then a front, and something sad and distinctly Irish played, slowing eerily as the tires lost momentum. Ronan scoffed at it, some private inside joke, and placed it back beside the Pig. Adam ached.

“I think this is the most impractical place I’ve ever stepped into,” he shrugged, looking around. A shiny foosball table served as their threadbare couch’s coffee table, an empty, sagging cardboard box served as the nightstand to Gansey’s lush, king-sized bed, and he was pretty sure that was a vintage yellow toaster hooked up on the floor beside the bathroom’s industrial-grade sink. “I think it’s very Gansey.” He looked at Ronan. “You love it, don’t you?”

Ronan jerked his chin noncommittally. "Hard to hate, isn't it?"

“Yeah,” Adam breathed, letting that sink in.

“Oh my _God,_ ” Noah laughed from across the space. “Virginia Uniform Summons… Ronan Lynch,” he murmured, reading the sheets and sheets of paper taped in tidy rows to what appeared to be an office door. “Are these _speeding tickets_?”

“What?” Blue joined Noah, running her fingers over one of the papers. “Did you seriously photocopy these? Was this your bedroom?” She turned to Ronan, laughing at him. “Wow, you’re so freaking _cool_ , dude.”

“Shut the fuck up, Sargent,” Ronan growled, stalking across the room to shield the door from them. He crossed his arms arrogantly, but Adam saw the pink creeping up his neck. “This is art.”

“Art,” Noah sniggered, but one glare from Ronan had him quickly coughing into elbow instead, slinking off to the bathroom to play with light switches and peer into their empty refrigerator.

Blue, however, only stopped laughing when deafening, grinding techno filled the warehouse, clattering off the walls and floors. She and Adam clamped hands over their ears, horrified, and Adam didn’t understand. The noise was distinctly _Ronan_ , the same dirty bass that most often filled his BMW, but it was impossible that he’d been the one to create it — not when he’d just been standing, flushing slightly in front of his mural of speeding tickets.

Gansey darted toward the bathroom, unfazed, with Ronan right behind him. The noise got impossibly louder as Adam entered the small room, and there a terrified Noah stood frozen beside the running shower, pointing up at the shower head.

Gansey quickly turned the temperature knob to the left, and the music faded to nearly nothing. When he cut the water, the music cut too. He wiped his hands on his khakis.

“Ah, yes, forgot to mention the shower,” Gansey gestured casually behind him. “Ronan’s first, uh, _addition_ to the place.”

“You created a shower system whose knobs control music volume, and not temperature?” Blue asked. She raised a pointy eyebrow. “How do you make it the temperature you want, then?”

“It’s always the right temperature,” Ronan said proudly, and Adam realized he’d been wrong, hadn’t looked carefully enough. The place might be Gansey through and through, but integral pieces of it were Ronan’s, too.

“Okay… How did you hook it up to the existing plumbing, then?” Blue asked, skeptical. “That’s not how this works, is it? Like, you can’t just insert one dream part and expect all the non-magical bits to listen to it…” Her eyes widened. “Can you?”

Ronan flashed a smile, and Adam couldn’t find any sharp edges in it. “Apparently, I can.”

***

Adam was pretty sure there’d been a plan for the weekend, a sensible reason for why they’d made the whole journey to Henrietta in the first place. In fact, he could remember the exact moments that gave him that impression, starting with Gansey’s words in the campus parking lot—“I think we should return to our original plan”— and ending with a very convincing display of confidence and preparation within their first hour at Monmouth.

“Okay, guys,” Gansey had announced grandly, upending the contents of one of the larger boxes onto the floor. “Are you ready to get to work?” He’d stood among a scattering of deformed-looking metal detectors, bulky walkie-talkies, barometers, thermometers, archaic compasses, and myriad other odder little devices that Adam didn’t recognize but was sure cost a fortune. He’d grinned. “I’ve got a plan.”

It had involved careful expeditions into the forest around Blue’s corpse road, maps scribbled with loops of larger and larger diameter around an old church, a quick stop for ice cream at what they’d all insisted was the best place in town – no overwhelming feat, Adam was sure – a visit with Blue’s psychics, a thorough inspection of the Barns, some heavily supervised dreaming. It had involved research and documentation and organization, and it had seemed reasonable and logical and fairly manageable.

And not a single ounce of it had happened yet.

Adam wasn’t exactly sure how everything had devolved, but the tipping point began with Noah, heavily encouraged by a grinning Ronan, and had ended with the three hours the two of them then spent on reconstructing a set of wooden ramps in the front of the lot and shooting the BMW off of them.

Adam had done that too, before, but with miniature cars made of plastic and ramps he’d constructed out of notebooks. On a small scale like that, the whole thing was controlled, contained, lacked that stomach-lurching moment when all four wheels left the earth and that sickening _thunk_ of impact when they returned. He was pretty sure he preferred his version, even if the real thing entailed Noah’s helpless peals of laughter and Ronan’s savage _woop!_ s.

“God,” Gansey said, cringing as he, Blue, and Adam watched the BMW soar through the air for somewhere near the dozenth time. “He’ll be begging you to repair his suspension in no time.”

Adam laughed, and it was a dry sound. “I’ll refer him to a specialist.”

“Oh?” Gansey asked distractedly, full-body flinching when the front tires hit gravel. “Who’s that?”

Adam toed a straight line in the gravel and shrugged. Dreamt repairs for a dreamt car; it was only logical.

“Don’t be stupid,” Blue said from his other side. “There’s no one else he’d let touch his dad’s car.” When he began a quiet noise of protest, she leveled him with a threatening glower. “I said ‘ _let_ ,’ Adam Parrish, and I know you heard me.”

“Jane,” Gansey said, turning to Blue with a slow smile on his face. Adam wasn’t sure where the nickname had come from, but judging by Blue’s flustered, half-hearted glare, he didn’t think she was entirely opposed to it. “Speaking of cars…”

***

The idea itself might have been harmless enough—well-intentioned, even— but it was a nightmare from the start.

Adam knew from experience that Gansey was an erratic lecturer, preferring to focus intensely on the minute details that interested him most and often forgetting to tie it all together until the very end, stringing along seemingly disjoint ideas and expecting his students to follow the bread crumbs themselves.

He wasn’t sure what Gansey’d managed so far in the way of instruction, but the results were dismal: Blue pressed too-close against the dashboard, peering cautiously over the top of the steering wheel, hovering somewhere around five miles per hour and slapping Gansey’s hand away every time he tried to help her through a gear shift. Any time she ventured too close to something resembling actual _driving_ , she’d slam on the brakes and send the car shuddering to a stop.

Noah hovered beside Adam across the lot from them, wincing every time their voices grew heated enough to be audible through the windows, while Ronan just sprawled languidly across the hood of his BMW, eyes closed, picking furiously at the fresh set of scabs the ramp construction had left him with.

Adam watched the Camaro’s brake lights flash twice and then, with horror, he watched them stay on. He was pretty sure the car could drive faster than that in neutral, and he was equally sure that if Blue kept up like this, Gansey was going to cry.

It felt only natural when Gansey called Ronan over to help, and for better or for worse, Adam was sure he’d accept. Any chance to play around with the coveted Camaro, to show off his intuitive grasp of a stick shift, to dangle a little power over Blue for a few minutes.

He watched, intrigued, waiting for the scene unfolded, anticipating storms of cursing and a very shrill Blue. He watched as Ronan slid lazily off his car, made his way as slowly as physically possible across the lot, and finally leaned into the passenger’s side window, wrists propped up on the hood.

He then watched, after much back-and-forth and several pleading looks from Gansey, as Ronan just shook his head, picked at his nails and declared, without looking up, “I’m not a fucking driving instructor, Dick.” He knocked the roof twice and stepped away. “Remember, maggot. Ten points if you hit a tree, a hundred if it’s a person.”

Blue scowled at him, Gansey dropped his head to his hands groaning, and Adam didn’t understand. If it was Adam behind the wheel, the shifts would be shaky, sure, but they’d catch, and there was only one person and a couple hours of supervised practice he could thank for that.

When Ronan caught Adam watching him, he offered a cursory middle finger before launching himself back onto his hood, muttering and grunting for a few moments as he found a suitably comfortable position.

Adam ducked his head, allowing something very small and tenuous to dawn on him, and studiously avoided Noah’s knowing smirk.

***

When Gansey found Adam, it was just after sunset. The others were still finishing up their pizza leftovers, vehemently arguing over which of Gansey’s antique trivia games they’d all play tonight. They were loud enough to be heard from outside, by now, but Adam had learned the night before that he wasn’t picky; Gansey could win them all drunk and blindfolded, and it was possible that it wasn’t about winning anyway.

Either way, Adam had stepped out just for a few moments, just to try to reset his perspective. To try to see Henrietta, a bleak, dusty town so similar to his own, from the perspective of the second-floor landing of Monmouth Manufacturing. To try to see it as Gansey had seen it: a vital pit stop on the way to a far better destination, a hopeful place of adventure and possibility, the unimpressive gates to a hidden wonderland.

He wasn’t sure he’d made all that much progress on it by the time that Gansey slipped out and leaned against the wall beside him, but at least he was trying.

When Gansey saw what Adam was spinning in his fingers, he held out hand, palm up, and Adam obliged. It wasn't like they were in short supply, anyway; he could find another hundred more in Ronan’s dashboard alone.

Gansey held it up the pill and squinted at it. “Do you think he’ll take them?”

“I dunno.” Adam said, because he didn’t.

“Do you think they’ll hurt him?” Gansey asked. He paused, then clarified, “Do you think _he’d_ hurt him?”

Adam thought about it, but he didn’t know. “Not much we can do about it either way, right?”

“I know you want me to,” Gansey sighed, head tilted back against the door. “Do something, I mean. But I don’t—it has to come from him, at some point.”

Adam nodded. That was both fair enough and true enough.

“That isn’t to say that I—I mean.” He took a breath and started over. “Of course I’ll be there, every single time that I can, to try to stop him, to try to clean up after him. But until he chooses for himself…” Gansey passed the little pill back to Adam. He pushed his hands into his khaki pockets and inhaled, and Adam felt he could see the years of worry lining his eyes. He wasn't sure that Ronan'd had a right to put them there. “He didn’t used to be like this, you know.”

Adam thought of the Barns, of Ronan diving barefoot into its tall grass, sinking down next to sleeping animals, and struggled to reconcile everything that made Ronan _Ronan_. “I think I know that.”

Gansey watched him for a moment, nodded to himself, and then clapped a hand on Adam’s shoulder before heading back inside.

***

It was just after two a.m. and Ronan was restless, starfished face-down across his bed, impatiently burning for morning. Physical exhaustion hardly fazed him anymore; he’d dreamed enough over the last few weeks, experienced enough near-misses and disappointments and failures to tide him over for the near future. Now he was urgently awake, buzzing with the responsibility of what he held in his pockets, the promise of everything they could bring him, could let him bring to reality— and the threat of how seriously things could go wrong. For now he didn't see the point in sleeping without dreaming, and unless he took the pills, he didn't know how to dream without failing.

There was still the Orphan Girl, but he didn’t understand whose she was, how deeply she could be trusted. He felt she’d been there since the beginning, since those fledgling, confused dreams had first sneaked up on him all those years ago, but how could he know? He wouldn’t risk what he didn’t understand.

So he resigned himself to lay there, irritable and useless, not quite daring to dream and still unsure how to be awake, caught in a dreamer’s limbo.

And, just like in the way of dreams, he let chronology slip from his fingers. He didn’t mind that time was passing, and he didn’t care to keep tabs on its speed or order. He didn't mind when Adam slipped into his bedroom, quiet as a shadow, to perch on the edge of his bed, and he didn’t mind that there was a trove of things still unspoken between them, things they should probably sort out sooner rather than later, things like the weekend they’d spent carefully orbiting around the edges of the group, minimizing direct contact with one another; things like impulsive kisses and a certain obsessed dreamer.

He didn’t mind that he couldn’t necessarily see Adam, per se, because knowing he was there was enough, and he certainly didn’t mind it at all when he felt the bed shift ever so slightly and a hesitant finger stretched out to trace the edge of his shoulder blade, gently dragging along what Ronan knew to be the edge of a wing in flight. Raven boys, raven tattoos, raven pets—Ronan’s life seemed bound inextricably to some pattern he was too close to make out. It was all blurred out in front of his eyes.

“You’re so fucking difficult to read,” Ronan said. It wasn’t accusing, it wasn’t heated; it was just a fact.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, and he sounded under water. The pressure grew firmer as Adam traced wider loops, reaching to curl up around the base of his neck where smoke plumes and claws licked out from the Celtic knot.

“I can never even tell what you want,” Ronan said. He knew he should turn over, now, but his body felt like lead. Sleep suddenly seemed incredibly appealing, dreams or no dreams, except he couldn’t quite remember the last time he’d been awake, and for all he’d dreamed of this with Adam before, Ronan wasn’t sure that it felt so good in reality.

“No,” Adam agreed, and it didn’t sound like Adam at all. The pressure grew firmer still, bordering on painful, and then sharp nails scraped forward to press into the base of Ronan’s throat, and somehow Ronan’s entire _face_ hurt, like he’d been slammed into concrete, or maybe into a guard rail—except that didn’t make any sense, and everything was wrong.

Pain spurred him into motion and he flipped over, feeling flooded with something shamefully close to _betrayal_ as he cupped his throat protectively and turned to meet Adam’s eyes. That _Adam_ of all people would — Ronan didn’t understand.

And then he did, because whoever it was that had broken into his room — _whatever_ it was — was decidedly not Adam. He saw limbs and a torso, hands and feet and a neck, all the things that went into making a thing human, but instead of a face, Ronan could only make out icy cold dread in the form of a hideous mask, something so familiar he was sure if he could just _touch_ it he’d understand.

He stretched his fingers out, the thing burst into flames at the contact, and Ronan burst awake.

***

Nighttime in Henrietta was an enormous thing, powerful as a lightning storm and suspended as stagnant water. This late in the year, there wasn’t even the gentle buzzing of mosquitoes or June bugs or fireflies, there wasn’t the frenetic chirping of crickets or warbling of mockingbirds or eerie hooting of watchful owls. There was nothing, really. It was just still, expansive, inescapably quiet, and it was something Ronan had long ago become acquainted with.

How many nights had he woken up exactly like this, in exactly this makeshift bedroom, sweat-sticky and terrified, plagued by a fear so burning it turned to anger in his veins, and found reprieve only in the feel of pedals under his soles and open air in his lungs?

Ronan sat up. There was a choice he had to make, and he made it unthinkingly, had resolved himself to it before he even slid out of bed. There was someone who had answers, who could sort out the whole fucking thing for him: the dreams, the magic, the pills, the forest. There was no one else; he just had to ask.

He grabbed boots and a beanie before slipping quietly past the couches where Blue and Noah and Adam were sleeping, hopefully soundly. He wasn’t in the mood to be followed.

Once he was out in the midnight sky, he did his best to muffle the door behind him, only remembering at the last minute that he hadn’t brought keys. It didn’t matter; with any luck, he wouldn’t be needing them tonight.

He trudged across the overgrown lot, a perfect bee-line to where the ramps had been laid out, to where his father’s BMW was still flung recklessly across the gravel –

And he walked resolutely past it, eyes on what lay beside it, and slowed only when he found what he was looking for. _Who_ he was looking for.

***

“Couldn’t sleep?” Gansey asked amiably, sprawled across the hood of his orange Camaro with eyes trained on the dark textured blanket of stars above them and a mint leaf dangling from his lips. How Gansey could ever stand the taste of those things, Ronan would never understand, but he supposed there were plenty of things he’d never understand about Gansey. The feeling was probably mutual.

He snorted, lightly kicking a tire by way of answer, and Gansey turned to look him in the eye. Whatever he saw made him sigh in defeat, and the sound left Ronan exhausted. He wanted them past all this, he wanted to no longer be another burden on Gansey’s shoulders, a thing to be leashed, tracked, worried over. He wanted to be an equal, competently wielding this unwanted power in the same way Gansey wielded his. He _wanted._

“Ah,” Gansey said succinctly. “Are you hurt?”

“Nah,” Ronan said, feeling sharp nails pressed above his collarbones, feeling nauseous at whatever he’d let touch him. He shoved scorched fingers into his sweats pocket, and that did hurt. “Nothing visible.”

Gansey watched him and didn’t answer, then leaned back against the windshield and scooted a couple of feet over. Ronan hopped up and slid beside him wordlessly, and Gansey knocked their shoes together.

After a few minutes, Gansey waved his arm grandly at the night sky, a conductor in front of his orchestra. “Tonight feels like a night for truth, doesn’t it?”

“I guess, man,” Ronan said. He scoffed. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Hmm,” Gansey mused, spinning the leaf in his teeth. “I’ll go first, then. I’ve been thinking,” he murmured obliquely.  “And I think something’s starting.”

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Gansey said. “And there are so many parts, I’m not even sure how to prioritize them, but… I don’t think we even need to, actually. I think it’s all related. I think we could pick up any frayed edge, tug,” he mimed a gentle pulling in the air, followed by an explosion. “And the whole damn thing would fall apart.”

Ronan grunted noncommittally, getting it but only just barely. Something might be starting, might have started weeks ago, really, but he desperately hoped it brought with it the end of something else.

“I think it’s all finally happening,” Gansey said. He nudged Ronan. “Don’t you?”

“I think,” Ronan said, rubbing at the goose bumps rising on his bare shoulders. “I think it’s cold as fuck out here, you weirdo.” Gansey huffed at him, and Ronan knew he had to do better, try harder. He opened his mouth. “And I think… I don’t know. I think you’re right, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Everything’s coming together at once,” Gansey insisted. “The ley lines, the psychics, the dreams—even Kavinsky. It’s got to all be connected, right?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“I guess we’ll find out in time,” Gansey murmured, and Ronan wished he could give him more. He was still caught in that murky haze between dreams and reality, and he wished Gansey would just absorb it all through osmosis, churn out some profound solution, and lay it out simply for him. He didn't want to have to ask for it. Gansey sighed. “Your turn, then.”

He dug around in his coat pocket for a moment, and when he stretched his hand in offering, Ronan didn’t even have to ask where he’d gotten them. They were everywhere, at this point. Heaps of them in his car, around his room, his pockets, his dreams.

They looked out of place, wrong somehow, in Gansey’s broad palm. Ronan picked one up and crushed it between his fingers.

“Is this the part where you tell me not to take them?”

Gansey sighed, and seemed to choose his words slowly. “I’m not your warden, Ronan. I can’t influence you any more than I can control Blue, Adam, my history professor.” Ronan disagreed, had seen firsthand just how well Gansey could influence the people around him, but Gansey carried on. “But I can tell you my opinion, if you want it.”

Ronan waited for Gansey to continue and looked up when he didn’t. Gansey was looking at him expectantly, patiently, and Ronan relented. He nodded fractionally.

“I think you shouldn’t take them, but it's not for the reasons you might think.” Gansey took his time pulling another leaf from his pocket, and when he spoke again it wasn't what Ronan expected. “He’s known about you, right from the very start, and we never questioned it. How?”

Ronan shrugged. “S’been a lot going on.”

“No, it should have been a priority...” Gansey trailed off and then shook his head. “There's more to it than just this, but I want you to consider something: he says you need those things to dream with precision, but then who dreamt them up in the first place?”

Ronan said nothing, caught in a loop of logic and small, bubbling hope at the implication of Gansey's words.

“I say you put it on hold,” Gansey said decisively. He shook out the pills into Ronan’s hand and closed Ronan’s fingers around them, but Ronan wasn't sure he wanted them. If Gansey was suggesting there might be any other way, he didn't want them. “The whole goddamn lot of it. Until you understand it better.”

“Isn’t that we’ve been doing all weekend? Putting everything on hold?” He dumped the pills into the hood of Gansey’s coat and ignored Gansey’s squawk. “We haven’t figured a single fucking thing out yet.”

Gansey shrugged. “Well, it’s not like this place is going anywhere. We can come back next weekend, the weekend after. We can explore the ley lines, visit the Barns, see Blue’s psychics, focus on your mother. But maybe we do real life for a bit, too. Nino’s, the bookstore, hall parties, that god-awful Latin class you coerced me into taking.” Gansey nudged Ronan’s elbow playfully, but his next words were serious. “There’s no time limit, Ronan.”

Ronan wasn’t sure he agreed, but worded like that, in Gansey’s sincere, confident voice, it was difficult not to believe it. To _want_ to believe it.

“I'm just suggesting you press pause, that's all. You’ve been dreaming yourself dead the last couple of weeks. Reintegrate a bit, start small.” He yawned and stretched leisurely along the hood, melting seamlessly into the rumpled, insomniated version of of himself that featured in most of Ronan's memories of this place. The familiarity of it was comforting, and Ronan eased himself into a more relaxed sprawl. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. You’ll go to church, you’ll tell Matthew hi for me—”

“Not Declan?” Ronan asked, grateful for the shift in conversation. He flicked a few errant pills off the hood.

Gansey shuddered. “Only if he asks about me.”

“He won’t.” Ronan laughed, a bitter sound. He could do that, now, looking back, even if nothing that had happened between the three of them was particularly funny at all. “The shame runs too deep by now.”

“Mm,” Gansey mused. He munched thoughtfully for several minutes, and when he spoke again, his voice was uncertain. “Listen… I know you never even wanted to come here, in the first place, all those years ago—”

 _Two and a half,_ Ronan wanted to correct, hit with a deluge of his worst memories. The first night he’d slept here, because he’d had nowhere else to go. The first night Gansey’d bailed him out of a holding cell, because he’d had no one else to call. They were some of the strongest, most impressionable moments he'd experienced, but they were only the smallest fraction of what he'd come to associate with Monmouth.

“—I know you felt trapped, I know you hated me for keeping you in school, for keeping you on the straight path, but...” He turned to Ronan expectantly, searching out his expression, at once painfully sincere and vulnerable. “It’s kind of nice to be back, isn’t it?”

That someone like Gansey, of all people in the world, could ever doubt that he’d done right by his friends—that he’d done right by _Ronan—_ well. That was Ronan’s fault, then.

But if Gansey was right, and one frayed edge connected to another, and time stretched out endlessly before them, then he could fix it. From here on out, he’d work to fix it.

“Yeah, man,” Ronan said. “This place’s alright.”

Gansey knocked their feet together again, but this time the gesture seemed tinged with a little sentiment, a little gratefulness, and Ronan operated in neither.

He nudged Gansey back hard enough to send him pin-wheeling dramatically over the edge of the hood, and when he came back up, sputtering and indignant and covered in dust, Ronan just smirked at him and tipped his head back and watched the atmosphere unfurl from his fingertips.

It might not have been what he’d wanted at the time, but this place had been more than alright to him, and Gansey had to know that on some level. There was a reason Ronan was still following him.

“Since it’s a night for truth, and all,” Gansey said, after a few moments of brushing furiously at his coat and glaring impressively at Ronan. “You do realize that in a matter of hours you completely shot your suspension to hell, yes? After everything Adam did for you to get the thing running again, you went and launched it off a goddamn ramp. Multiple times. I honestly don’t understand why you’d—” He broke off, exasperated, and then finished calmly, vaguely patronizingly. He readjusted his wireframes with much dignity. “You do know you’ll need to get that repaired at some point, right?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. He smiled, but he figured Gansey wouldn’t see it in the dark. “I know.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whew, posting this after so long was surprisingly nerve-wracking! i found a typo the second after posting and died. i'm sure there are tons more.   
>  a million thank yous to those who still took the time to comment on or kudos this fic while it was on its incredibly long hiatus. each notification was a little gentle tug back to the story.
> 
> i did mention this was a slow-burn, right? buckle up :)


	12. The Forest

It was nine a.m. on a foggy, still Sunday morning, their final morning at Monmouth Manufacturing before it was back to the daily grind of stress and exhaustion that was a college student's reality, and Adam wasn’t sure he wanted to leave. He wanted to stay there, caught in that dreamy limbo of irresponsibility and adventure and timelessness and everything else that the weekend had promised. Everything he faced at school paled in comparison, and all of it would only be amplified by Gansey's newest, most bizarre phase of what was meant to be their crusade for information: _real life._

He sounded a little excited about it, a little conspiratorial, and Adam wondered if, between his grandiose upbringing and his obsession with the supernatural, Gansey even understood what it entailed at all.

“All the things that normal university students do,” Gansey clarified over coffee, when the five of them met in varying states of dishevelment around the model Henrietta. Gansey looked the wildest of all, his hair flat on one side and stuck up on the other, his eyes rimmed with grey smudges, and still he looked like something out of a catalogue. Adam ran self-conscious fingers through his own hair, trying to press the fluffier parts down with his palm. “Like, you know, ah…”

When Gansey seemed unable to come up with anything, Adam offered up, “Studying?”

“Yes!” Gansey agreed. “Studying, of course, and homework. And then there’s also…”

“Parties?” Noah chirped hopefully, pale skin a little translucent in the icy morning light. Gansey nodded sagely.

“Work?” Blue yawned, struggling to pull her hair into a knot above her head. When she finally finished, Adam watched as it sprang itself loose and sank sadly back down. Gansey looked at her a little sheepishly, and she snapped, “Fine, work for those of us without a trust fund, then.” Adam fist-bumped her.

The four of them then turned expectantly to Ronan, who’d shuffled out of his room sullenly, wrapped in a thick blanket over a pair of sweats and a sweatshirt and grumbling about how he was _freezing his fucking balls off._ Adam rolled his eyes, knowing Ronan'd had a space heater beside his bed all night while the rest of them had slept burrowed deep under heaps of mismatched blankets. He sipped his coffee, said nothing, and watched Ronan flop down across from him.

When Gansey prompted him, Ronan grinned sharply. “Racing?”

Three people exploded at once. Gansey launched into an impassioned lecture about the time and place for appropriate jokes, Blue leapt to her feet and was gesturing indignantly, and Adam was pretty sure the pillow that hit Ronan square in the face came from Noah.

Ronan caught it, snickering, and launched it back at Noah. When he met Adam’s eyes, Adam just shook his head. Ronan smirked deeper.

“…honestly, I don’t know why I even try sometimes, Lynch,” Gansey was ranting, looking extremely put out. “We had a perfectly nice conversation last night, and now you’re _mocking_ me…”

Blue and Noah looked at each other, confused, but Adam had seen that conversation even if he hadn’t heard it. He’d seen Ronan slip out Monmouth’s door well past midnight, had lain perfectly still on the couch and counted up to ten and then back down to one before allowing himself to hover by the windows. He’d watched Ronan march resolutely across the gravel lot, and he’d been irritated, irrationally so—irritated that Ronan’s solution was always to leave, irritated that the responsibility fell on Adam this time because it was Adam who’d seen him go, irritated because everything Gansey had said was right: at some point, Ronan had to choose for himself.

It wasn’t Adam’s place to stop him, and he wanted to not have to.

And then Adam had watched, disbelieving, as Ronan slid past his car and ended up on the hood of Gansey’s. And now they were doing real life.

“...and there’s nothing wrong at all with taking some time aside to catch up on schoolwork and focus on our grades, and—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ronan said then. He caught Gansey in a headlock and planted a wet smack to the side of his head. “I’ll be good, Dad.”

“Oh God,” Gansey shuddered, shoving him off. “Please don’t. Ever. Never again. Please.”

Ronan cackled, Noah laughed breathily, and Blue sank, still fuming, back down to the floor.

Finally they settled back down, all easing quietly into the day in their own ways. After a few minutes Gansey said, “So, is everyone good with that? We’ll still do everything we set out for, but… Maybe just a week to get back on track? I mean, real life could be pretty neat, don’t you think?”

Ronan snorted. As for Adam, it might not be much to the dreamers and scholars and psychic-amplifiers of the world, but between work and school and all the busy hours that lay in between, mundanity was something of a specialty of his.

***

Adam was usually a lot better at it than this. On paper he was doing fine, sat on the floor and leaned against the foot of Gansey’s enormous bed, flipping through the course material for the coming week’s lectures. Blue and Noah were across the room, curled into the couches and playing something on their phones, and Gansey was hunched just a few feet from Adam, contentedly lost to the careful gluing and painting of what appeared to be a cardboard replica of their dormitory.

It was quiet and comfortable and calm, and Adam should have finished the chapter by now.

But every time he flipped a page, his focus blurred out and he was tugged back to a dozen other places in time, all of which comprised some strange puzzle Adam couldn’t figure out and featured one single person who wasn't even in the room with them now.

And then he _was_ in the room with them, the door slamming open as he burst through it, windswept in his Sunday best, ears and nose reddened by the icy November fog. He skidded through Monmouth’s second-storey, only stopping just shy of crushing the sad little drug store at the end of Gansey’s Main Street, and he looked like he'd emerged from a nightmare.

He stared hard at Gansey, slightly breathless and unreadable, and began tugging at the tie around his neck and kicking off his dress shoes.

“We have a fucking problem,” Ronan said.

***

“I don’t understand,” Gansey said for the second time, carefully laying his worn glue brush in a plastic tray. He looked longingly at the half-painted building in front of him and then looked up, resigned. Ronan almost felt guilty. “I thought that this morning we all agreed… I thought we were taking a pause.”

Ronan heard Noah and Blue rise from the couch behind him and shuffle closer, and the back of his neck prickled. The nameless panic that’d been steadily bubbling up in his chest for the last half hour morphed, shifting rapidly into the anxiety of being caged, watched, studied, _manipulated_. By more than just the people in this room.

“I went to church,” Ronan said blankly, ignoring Blue’s _hey!_ of protest as he flung his suit jacket somewhere behind him. “You told me to go to church, I fucking went to church.”

Gansey blinked at him, apparently lost.

“Look, I already _said_ it,” Ronan snapped. He wanted everyone piled in the car five minutes ago, not still sleepy-eyed, hunkered down in sweat pants and staring up at him in confusion. “I _told_ you already, I’ve said it six times. We’re fucking wasting time, lounging around like this. The psychics, or whatever, or the ley line—whatever we came here for, right? Let’s fucking do it. Right now.”

Adam shook his head. “We have class tomorrow. I have work.”

“Then we better hurry,” Ronan said. He turned back to Gansey. “Come _on,_ man, why not? Tell me you don’t want to. Tell me you actually want to stall.”

“But I—I don’t even know where to start, to be honest,” Gansey said, scraping fingers through his hair. “That’s what I was trying to tell you last night.”

“No, you said we could start anywhere. You said it didn’t matter, that it was all related—” He sounded desperate, pathetic even to himself, and he hated it. He spun to face Blue.  “You made maps and shit, right? For the ley line?”

Blue opened her mouth, startled, then closed it again. “I did, but… I don’t even know what we’d be looking for.”

“Then what the fuck have we even been _talking_ about?” Ronan spit. He felt Gansey’s eyes on him, considering him, and he knew he owed them an explanation, but, “If it’s not actually important to you guys, if _—_ “

“We can go,” Gansey cut in decisively. Adam made a small sound from his spot on the floor, and Gansey met his eyes for a moment before amending: “But no matter what, we have to be back on campus by 8p.m., and it’s back to real life until next weekend. No exceptions. Okay?”

“Fine,” Ronan huffed, watching impatiently as each of the others nodded in assent.

“God, and we were having such a good morning, too. _This_ —” Blue gestured up and down Ronan’s frame, scowling. “This right here is why I don’t go to church,” she grumbled, stifling a yawn before bending to rifle through her duffle bag.

He whirled on her, hissing, but Gansey held him in place with a hand on his shoulder.  He stared at him for a long moment, long enough that Adam and Blue had gone off to get ready by the time he spoke.

“You’re going to tell me eventually.”

Ronan looked away but jerked a nod.

***

When they all trickled silently out of Monmouth, it was the kind of sharp chill that cut right through Adam and left his bones feeling raw. In all their rushing to avoid Ronan's impatient fury, it seemed they’d all opted for the university sweatshirts they’d received at freshmen orientation, and together they looked like something out of a campus brochure, navy and gold and scholastic – everyone except Ronan, who wore his two sizes too large and over inky black jeans and combat boots. With Chainsaw on his shoulder, he looked like something else entirely.

“What’s the problem?” Adam asked him as Ronan flicked through the dozen locks that safeguarded the abandoned warehouse. When he just looked at him, Adam pressed on. “When you got back to Monmouth, the first thing you said was that we had a problem.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, jiggling the last lock and kicking once at the door for good measure. “My problem is we keep talking like we’re gonna get shit done, and nothing ever happens.”

Adam stared at him a moment, thinking of Ronan’s willingness to laze the last three days away carelessly. The hours spent on the Camaro with Gansey the night before, his good humor this morning. Ronan might not ever lie, but— “That’s only a half-truth, Lynch.”

Ronan shuffled neatly around him without answering and stomped down the stairs, and Adam watched as he bit distractedly at his wristbands, the ones still entwined with the strange white petals. Adam had noticed them the morning they appeared, had seen them peeking out of Ronan's leather sleeve somewhere between campus and Henrietta. It seemed Ronan was too upset to remember to keep them hidden, now.

Adam stood on the landing, considering how difficult it was to know somebody so boarded up, as secretive about a dreamt bracelet as a night terror, as ashamed of the good as the bad.

But he supposed he didn’t have much ground to stand on, there. He let it go for now.

***

“Are you absolutely certain that’s the correct direction?” Gansey asked, tracing unimpressed eyes up the length of the dark, eroding church in front of them. It looked like a prop from a gothic-inspired horror film, something so incongruent with the benign, simple town it butted up against it felt unreal, and the vivid Camaro looked terribly out of place on the unpaved road outside its gates. It was Ronan, blacked-out and villainesque, who blended there best.

Blue spun in place twice, scanning the wall of trees that formed a lumpy perimeter around the stone building. Ronan huffed at her impatiently, and she scowled back at him.

“Well, we sit up there…” Blue gestured to a half-decayed stone wall that separated the churchyard from its graveyard. She held up two hands and peered through them like a camera lens, then nodded decisively. “And we watch them walk to the church from there.”

 _Them,_ of course, being Henrietta’s yearly deceased, something Adam hadn’t quite wrapped his head around yet, something he wasn’t sure was strictly possible. He saw Chainsaw in his periphery, nibbling irritably at the drawstring of Ronan’s sweatshirt, and he supposed the time might have long come and gone for him to pick and choose which kinds of magic he believed in. Either way, he wasn’t sure this was a magic he wanted any part of.

“That’s the corpse road,” Blue said with confidence. “They walk a straight line, so if we just follow it back to the way they come…”

Noah shivered, Ronan stared dubiously at the shadowy clump of trees ahead of them, and Gansey drew a decisive red line straight through his map.

“It’s twelve,” Adam said, checking his tattered watch. “Which only leaves us a few hours. What’s the plan?”

Gansey hitched his backpack higher onto his shoulders and turned toward the treeline. “I guess we walk,” he said.

***

So they walked, and walked and walked, and Chainsaw scouted circles around them, soaring far ahead of Gansey and Blue and _kerah_ -ing savagely on every return arc. Adam dimly registered the shift in the forest from sleepy late morning to buzzing early afternoon, the subtle change in atmosphere and noise, the gentle warming of the air. It was natural, soothing, and if over time the transition became far more dramatic than it should have, the fog dissipating into the bright, golden light of an afternoon more suited for summer than for a Virginian autumn, it happened too slowly to notice.

Time passed differently in forests, anyway, with even the brightest of sunshine drifting only moodily through the leaves, and Adam lost track of it altogether, too caught up in the rhythmic lull of left, right, left as he trailed deeper and deeper into the foliage beside Ronan.

And then he _really_ lost track of time, because his watch chose then to break for the second time that year. He told Ronan as much, flicking at the glass face irritably.

Ronan just stared at it. “But I fixed it in September.”

“I know,” Adam huffed. “Thanks again for that. Guess the battery died again or something.”

“No, like—I _fixed_ it,” Ronan said. He tugged the watch off Adam’s wrist and pried open the back with a bitten thumbnail. He peered inside almost accusatorially, and when he spoke again, he sounded a little betrayed. “It wasn’t supposed to die.”

Adam took it back from him and looked inside, and carved in Ronan’s scribbly writing on the tiny round battery was the word _libenter._ He ran his index finger over it, realizing at once that he’d been wearing a dream thing around his wrist for the last two months.

He looked back up at Ronan, mind latched on the most pressing implication, but Ronan just scraped a hand down the back of his head, looking anywhere but at him. “It’s just a joke,” Ronan scoffed. “You were never even supposed to see it, okay, cuz it was never supposed to fucking die in the first place—”

“Guys,” Gansey called from somewhere a few paces ahead of them. “Guys, come look at this.”

***

They were still in the forest, still surrounded by the hundreds of scraggly bare branches and brittle undergrowth that were broken up only occasionally by some living green foliage, and Ronan didn’t understand why they were stopped. All he saw was a tree. It was tall, sure, and greener than he’d come to expect from even the freezing pines this late in November, but he still didn’t know why it was worth stopping for, except—

“Wait, is that a fucking _walnut_ tree?” he asked, dragging a hand over its dark bark. It was massive, at least a hundred feet tall, and its dense canopy was endless, shading the entirety of the large stream that ran beside it.

“Black walnut,” Blue said, brows furrowed. “Juglans nigra, I think.”

Ronan stared at her, and he wasn’t the only one. When Blue registered the four pairs of surprised eyes on her, she snapped. “What, do private school boys have a patent on Latin now, or something?” She rolled her eyes, muttering, “It’s like you don’t even know what the environmental sciences program _is_.”

Noah patted her shoulder in sympathy. “It’s pretty,” he said, gesturing at the tree a little wistfully. “What’s so bad about it?”

Gansey shook his head. “Nothing, it’s just—”

“They’re deciduous,” Blue said, tilting back to peer up through the branches. “It’s almost December.”

“So the question is: why’s a deciduous tree in full bloom this late in the season,” Adam clarified for Noah.

Gansey pointed a finger at him in approval, checked their coordinates, scribbled something in his notebook, checked his phone—and then stopped short.

“Do any of you have the time?” Gansey asked. “I’d guess we’ve been out here about an hour, but my phone seems to be stuck.”

Ronan had left his at Monmouth, was pretty sure he would never be turning it on again, in fact, but he watched Adam pull open his horrible flip phone, shake it a few times, then sigh a rueful _no_.

When Blue and Noah both shook their heads, both presenting two screens frozen at 12:37p.m., just like Adam’s, Gansey hummed. He marked something new in his notebook, then turned on his heels and marched onward.

Ronan gave the tree one last mistrustful squint before trailing after the others.

***

“So,” Adam said when Ronan caught up with them. He kept his voice low, quiet, but between Noah’s eerie humming and Gansey and Blue’s incessant bickering and the lively murmur of the stream beside them, it was hardly necessary. “My watch stops working, and you dream me a battery that won’t die.”

 “Yeah?” Ronan waited for more, and when nothing else came he kept walking. “Great synopsis there, Parrish.”

“But that was before the crash…” Adam studied him, head tilted slightly. “Which means you didn’t take any pills first.”

It wasn’t a question, and it didn’t need an answer. Ronan walked on.

“ _Wait_ ,” Adam insisted, tugging at Ronan’s arm to get him to stop. “So it’s not like Chainsaw, or the compass, or that bracelet you’ve been trying to chew off for the last three days.” Ronan burned, a protest on the tip of his tongue, but Adam cut him off. “It wasn’t random. You wanted to bring this back, and you _did_ , and you did it alone. You controlled it.”

Ronan snorted. “Wanna know how many fucking tries it took?” he asked, and then immediately regretted it. He didn’t want Adam to have that image of him, wasting hours flickering between consciousnesses, collecting a small pile of failure beside him. He tried to take a step forward, but Adam held him in place.

“I don’t get how you don’t get it,” Adam said, brows furrowed. “I think… I think you’re not being logical about it, somehow. You got yourself stuck on all the parts that don’t matter.”

“What the fuck are you even talking about, Parrish?”

“ _This._ ” Adam waved his wrist in Ronan’s face. “A battery. A battery you intentionally designed _,_ one that had to fit into a watch that already existed, that had to line up with what was already there. How’s that any different from headlights or airbags?” He dropped his arm and stepped back a bit, considering Ronan from a new angle. He sounded a vaguely impressed and a little relieved when he said, “You did it once, which means you can do it again.”

“I’ve _tried,_ ” Ronan said, and it came out a little savage. “You really think I haven’t? It’s all I’ve been fucking doing for _weeks.”_

Adam shook his head. “You can do it again,” he said, before turning away to catch up with the others.

***

They were in a clearing, the first they’d come across all day, having followed the twisting stream deeper and deeper into the forest, and no matter how uneasy the truth was it was impossible to ignore it any longer: they were, without a doubt, no longer rooted in the same season that’d painted their morning at Monmouth a murky white.

This was early summer, bright, gleaming summer in all its golden glory, before the oppressive heat beat back the flowers and dust ruled the valley, and every single inch of it was teeming with life, from hummingbirds and butterflies to beetles and—

“Bees,” Gansey observed blankly, eyes locked on the large flowering bush Noah’d nearly trampled right into, and sure enough there were bees, their gold and black bands unmistakable from this close up. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, caught in the busy shuffle from flower to flower, buzzing insistently in small arcs around the flowers.

Ronan’s eyes flashed, and then he was darting forward to catch Gansey’s shoulders and drag him a solid ten feet back. “What the _fuck_ , man?” Ronan spit, and for all Adam would rather avoid a sting, too, he wasn’t quite sure he understood the theatrics. “You just fucking stood there.”

Gansey blinked as if in a daze, and then snapped back to animation. “Why are there bees?” He spun in a small circle, eyeing every detail of their surroundings. “Why are we in… what, late spring? Summer?”

“Wait,” Blue raised an eyebrow at him, missing the point entirely. “Are you afraid of bees, or something? Is that King Gansey’s one great weakness—apiphobia?”

It was clear she was teasing, but Ronan bared his teeth at her and Noah nudged her warningly, and Gansey said nothing at all.

Adam looked away, back to the bush, and then squinted. He approached it very carefully, wary of the insects’ flight paths, and something wasn’t right at all. “I don’t think they’re bees,” he said.

He looked up at Gansey, and Ronan stalked forward to see for himself.

“What the fuck,” he whispered.

***

It was obvious that Gansey loved the little clearing, loved everything around it for miles, but Ronan didn’t trust a single inch of it. It felt far too familiar, too reminiscent of the dream space he’d shared with Kavinsky, and unease tinted the edges of the place, painting the shadows eerie and the sparkling pool of water bittersweet. It felt exactly like a dream, the kind that could turn ugly quickly.

“I told you something was starting,” Gansey whispered to him, an excited gleam in his eyes. “And now, look where we are.” He raised his arms up and tilted his head back, bowing backwards, and on anyone else it’d look ridiculous. On Gansey it looked like what the word _elated_ was supposed to mean. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Ronan snorted, said nothing, and kept his eyes peeled for what he was looking for, dreading it even as he was sure it was there. He was so focused on his private search, he almost forgot to be irritated when Blue caught up with him along the edge of the stream.

“So, is there something we should know about that?” Blue asked, gesturing at where Gansey was cautiously leaned over the blooming bush of what were, apparently, not-bees. “About Gansey and bees?”

“That’s Gansey’s story.”

“I don’t think he’d tell me all of it,” Blue said.

Ronan gave her his best smile, a sharp-edged warning. “I wouldn’t either.”

“What’s your version, then?” Adam asked, stepping into line beside Blue.

“He’s allergic,” Ronan said, and it was so overly simplified it felt like a lie. He didn’t tell them about Gansey’s first run-in with them, didn’t tell them what the doctors had said about the likelihood of surviving another sting. He didn’t tell them about his recurring nightmares, about finding Gansey again and again covered in swarms of the things in his dreams, still and vacant-eyed and stung all over; he didn’t tell them about the dozens of nights he’d spent trying to dream up something better than an old epipen, something that’d _work._

“How serious is it?” Blue asked, eyes wide, at the same moment that Gansey marched up beside them.

She startled, guilty for having asked about him behind his back, but Gansey just shrugged. “Fairly,” he said breezily. “I’m not too concerned about it.”

Ronan knew Gansey was all bravado, knew he was lying through his teeth, either to himself or to the others, but it didn’t matter. Ronan’s anxiety was enough for the both of them.

He watched as Gansey leaned very slowly toward another bush and cupped his hand around a flower, capturing one of the shapeless little bugs, and when he opened his fingers a few inches from Blue’s face, it was a damselfly that hovered mid-air for a moment before zigzagging away.

Blue gave a slow, bright smile that Gansey returned, and Ronan made a puking sound.

“Gross,” he said, and ignored the small flip in his stomach when Adam raised an eyebrow at him.

He slinked off on his own, then, covertly scanning tree trunks and the boulders along the side of the pool of water, searching for anything that shouldn’t strictly be there—a difficult feat, given they were miles deep into a forest that changed seasons, filled with bugs that changed species.

He wandered around the pool, kicking at pebbles and cursing the stupid magical summer sun, and finally tugged off his sweatshirt, tossing a middle finger at Noah’s cat-call. He widened his radius slightly, delving a little deeper into the scraggly brush and squishy moss, mind swimming with everything Kavinsky had told him.

 _My own personal Walmart,_ he’d said. _Why would you go anywhere else?_

 _This one’s mine,_ he’d said, even as the trees around him had protested. _But you can share it, for now._

What he suspected wasn’t possible, sounded crazy even to himself, but it’s not like anything else about Ronan’s life made much sense, either, and the longer he stood in the place the more he realized it had to be true.

He looked at Adam across the way, stiff and a little awkward as he stood off to the side of Gansey and Blue, and he thought about Adam’s insistence that he could control his dreams despite everything that proved the opposite, and he wondered if two pairs of eyes wouldn't get this done faster than just his alone.

He took a step toward him, and then he stopped. Because that’s when he saw, and promptly covered, the evidence he’d been afraid to find, nestled cheerfully between two trees.

***

When cool fingers tugged at Ronan’s elbow from behind, he flinched so hard he nearly slid off the boulders that lined the far side of the gurgling stream. He turned, baring his teeth and ready to tackle Noah into the water himself, but stopped short when he saw Noah’s expression.

“Adam…” he said, gesturing rapidly at the trees behind him. “We should find him.”

Ronan jumped down, cursing the idiocy of someone as smart as Adam traipsing off into a magical forest alone, and together they scanned the tree-line, the water, all of the rocks in between. Gansey and Blue seemed unconcerned, hunched together over the part of the stream where it fanned out into the pool, which meant Adam hadn’t been gone long at all.

It was only when he registered movement from _within_ a tree, a huge hollow one that butted up to the still waterline, that Ronan’s adrenaline spiked. He saw it in slow motion—the way Adam crumpled slightly, his shoulders sloped forward with his arms limp at his sides and his fists clenched, his head bowed low and his eyes closed.

Ronan dragged him out by his shoulders, catching Adam’s weight when he sagged forward.

 “What the fuck were you doing?” Ronan demanded, but when Adam seemed to register Ronan’s presence, he jerked out of reach. He pressed a single trembling finger to the corner of his eye. Ronan followed the motion, peering into his eye, scanning his face for damage, but saw nothing there.

Ronan took half a step toward the tree, but Adam caught his wrist. “Don’t,” he said, staring off at something over Ronan’s shoulder.

“Did you see something?” Noah whispered, and finally Adam met Ronan’s eyes, but they looked vacant, as hollow as the tree he’d emerged from. Something unpleasant crept up Ronan’s spine.

“We should go,” he said, letting his voice carry to the others.

“But it’s only been a few minutes,” Gansey whined, crouched low over the clear pooling of water, waving his hand back and forth above its surface. “We’ve only just found it, this is hardly enough—”

“I said we should _go_ , Gansey. We can always come back.”

Gansey heard something in his tone and stood, finally, and something in the very forest around them shifted, the gentle, golden afternoon light darkening quickly, the still water now lapping frantically at the rocks. Charcoal clouds gathered overhead in seconds, the scene shifting as quickly as a dream.

“It’s changing…” Noah shuddered. “I don’t know if we should be here when it’s like this.”

Blue stepped closer to them. “What happened to Adam?” she asked, reaching up to touch his shoulder. He flinched away slightly, and Blue’s eyes widened as she backed away carefully, watching the tree’s gaping entrance.

The sky was now so dark, so powerful, Ronan couldn’t remember what it’d looked like before. It was a perfect mirror of the unease pooling in his gut, and he wasn’t sure which had caused the other.

“I don’t understand…” Gansey gave one helpless, confused look at the storming forest, at Adam’s empty stare and brittle stance, before sharpening back into authority. “Okay. Okay, where’s Noah— _stop_ ,” he cried, lunging out to stop Noah from dipping his fingers into the rushing, now-murky stream beside them. “No one touches anything. What’s the fastest way out of here?”

He looked at Blue, but she just squinted up past the trees, at the churning sky above them and sucked in a breath. “Back the way we came, I guess. Right?”

“Okay.” Gansey nodded once and turned toward the path through the trees, then stopped abruptly, brows furrowed and head tilted. “Wait, what is… is that—”

Noah shivered. “It’s Latin.”

***

Much to Adam’s relief, they did indeed make it back to campus by 8p.m., and much to Ronan’s, Adam’s watch began working again by the time they’d cleared the forest. The group had been quiet on their return to the dorms, two carloads of sleepy teens shuffling dazedly across the parking lot, loaded down by duffle bags and a whole lot of confusion. No one had spoken at all, besides Ronan’s muted _fucker!_ when he tried to smuggle Chainsaw in under his sweatshirt and she bit at him through his shirt.

They’d parted ways hours ago, all pensive and uneasy in different way, and when Noah had dived headfirst into his squeaky twin bed, pulling out a pair of headphones and settling in for the long haul, Adam had turned to schoolwork. The library was closed that late at night, so he hid away in the second floor common room and planned to get ahead on some reading, burying the panic that’d been simmering all evening under layers upon layers of productivity.

It was well past midnight when the door to the stairwell opened and Ronan sneaked into the hallway, startling when he rounded the corner to find Adam already watching him. He looked momentarily sheepish and then immediately defensive, but Adam saw through it. More than anything else, he looked exhausted, his motions slower and thicker than usual, like it was all he could do to keep wading through consciousness.

“’Sup Parrish,” Ronan croaked, before sinking hard into the springy armchair that formed a half-moon with Adam’s couch. “Is Czerny sleeping?”

“Does he ever?” Adam asked, but he knew what Ronan was really asking. He dropped his pen, shook out his hand, and exhaled slowly. “I just wanted to be alone, I guess.”

When Ronan nodded sharply and began to rise again, Adam tossed a leg out and locked his ankle in place. “If I didn’t want you to be here, I’d just tell you straight out.”

Ronan froze for a moment before slumping back against the chair. “Wow, man. I’m touched,” he said, sarcastic. Adam didn’t take the bait.

Ronan flipped through Adam’s pile of textbooks, choosing one somewhere in the middle and rifling through it absently. Adam eyed his progress for a moment, skeptical, then returned to his own reading.

“I don’t want to talk about what happened,” he said after a few minutes. “With the tree, I mean.”

“S’fine,” Ronan grunted, turning a page before he could have read it. He looked halfway asleep already, stubbornly holding onto the conversation by only his fingertips. “Don’t even know what the hell that place was _._ Fucking hot-as-hell summer, and choose-your-own bugs, and—”

“It’s fine?” Adam demanded. “That’s it? You’d let it go, just like that?”

“I mean, there’s stuff I’m not telling you, either, right?” Ronan lifted and lowered a dismissive shoulder. It was true, and Adam found that reasonable. A secret for a secret, the fairest trade there was, the kind of logic that could override his curiosity. Ronan scoffed. “I’m more worried about Gansey and Noah diving head-first off the fucking deep end.”

Adam wished it were that simple. But if it came down to the likelihood of Gansey and Noah having had a joint hallucination featuring a dead language neither of them were particularly good at, versus the likelihood of the trees having actually offered a polite _welcome_ to the five of them, he was banking on the latter.

He watched as Ronan sprawled to take up as much space as physically possible on the arm chair, aggressively burrowing deep into the cushions. “Are you staying?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “I was about to fucking suffocate in there—Gansey brought about ten gallons of glue and paint back here.”

“Ah.” Adam exhaled a laugh, imagining what a tiny model of campus would look like sprawled across their dorm room floor. “He was working on the freshman dorms this morning.”

“He’s doing the library now.” He squished the hood of his sweatshirt into a pillow behind his neck and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “M’gonna end up tripping over it and busting my head open on the way to the toilet every morning.”

“Poor guy. Dream yourself a hardhat,” Adam deadpanned, biting down a grin when Ronan glared at him. “You just gonna sit there?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Ronan said, the words heavy with sleep.

“All night?” Adam asked, and Ronan shrugged. “Doing what? Staring at me?”

“Nothing else I’d rather do, Parrish,” Ronan sneered. But even as he said it, he tilted his head back, letting his eyes drift closed and his shoulders relax down.

Adam rolled his eyes and said nothing, and after a few minutes he heard Ronan’s breathing even out into long, slow exhales. He watched him, defensive and angular even in sleep, and he let himself, just this once, pick through the sharp contents of the tidy box labeled _Ronan_ in his mind, and face the facts head on.

***

When Ronan opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Adam, slumped forward onto the common room’s coffee table, his sweatshirt hood pulled low over his eyes and his face pillowed by his forearms. It was still dark out, and he knew he should wake him up, should give him half a shot at catching a few hours of sleep on something other than hard wood and scratchy couch, but the moment felt—nice.

The horrible fluorescent lights lining the halls, the threat of classes in just a few hours, Adam relaxed into sleep a few feet from him, it felt like the _real life_ Gansey’d told him to chase.

It was familiar, comfortable, routine, and it was entirely different from the normalcy he’d set off in pursuit of some sixteen hours earlier, when he’d donned a suit and a tie and performed the most stable tradition he knew, something that transcended both death and dreams: Sunday church at St. Agnes, flanked by his brothers in their usual pew. That was another kind of normal entirely, and this time it’d betrayed him.

It had gone like this:

They’d all been their usual selves—Matthew unconsciously hell-bent on defying the rules of growing up, somehow childish even at sixteen, Declan middle-aged and arrogant at just twenty, Ronan caught somewhere terrible and irritable between the two of them.

Ronan had hung his head, reveling in the usual medley of self-indulgent angst that mass always brewed, secretly satisfied that despite everything, this was one of the few things that somehow hadn’t changed for the Lynch brothers.

He knew there should have been a breaking point, somewhere, a series of them, really— spanning the years from their father’s death to Ronan’s adamance that he and Gansey _not_ attend Declan’s university in D.C., a decision which scattered the Lynch brothers farther than was strictly necessary but kept them shakily tethered to the their father’s world and minimized any future black eyes and smashed cartilage.

He’d sunk into it, into the priest’s familiar cadence and the sporadic bouncing of Matthew’s restless feet, and ignored the way his phone buzzed insistently on the floor beside his own.

“Is it Gansey?” Matthew had finally whispered, after it’d gone off for about the dozenth time, but Declan snatched it up before Ronan could check.

Ronan had made a small lunge for it, earning a pointed cough from somewhere behind him. “ _Seriously_ , Declan, what the—”

“Guys!” Matthew had scolded, but both ignored him.

“I’m just putting it on silent,” Declan had said haughtily. “Whoever it is can just wait until after—”

His hand had gone limp when he scanned the notification screen, and Ronan’s stomach had dropped, fearing the worst kind of news from Gansey, the only thing worth that kind of incessant texting when he knew Ronan was at St. Agnes—

“Why the hell do you know Kavinsky?” Declan had hissed, forgetting his own strict rules against swearing on holy property.

Ronan had squinted, ignoring Matthew’s murmured _seriously guys, shh_ , too busy lining up all the squeaky-clean presidential facts that comprised Declan’s life with the few debauched half-truths he knew about Kavinsky’s, scanning rapidly for an overlap. He found nothing, made sense of none of it.

“How the fuck do _you_?” Ronan had asked, and that fleeting sense of normalcy had rapidly devolved into the panic that had propelled him into the forest.

***

It was early evening, and they were all assembled around one of the larger round tables in Commons, picking at the lackluster cafeteria food and discussing the probability of talking trees.

Adam was tired, drained from the hours spent on his feet unloading shipments into the back stock at work and the pedantic drawl of his professor's repetitive lecture, so he just listened. He wasn’t sure this was really the sort of thing other, normal college students did—but he supposed it was about as close as they could get, for now.

Ronan was quiet, too, busy picking at the latest claw marks carved into his shoulder, pretending he thought the Gansey and Noah had absolutely _lost their fucking minds_ , but Adam knew better, could tell that he believed the trees had spoken, that he was badly shaken by one aspect of the weekend or another.

Adam could relate. When he’d woken in his bed that morning, it’d been from a series of dreams that played like horrible flashes – he saw Gansey, looming and powerful and dangerous, pointing desperately at Noah where he whimpered, bloody and limp on the ground beside a sobbing Blue; he saw his hands around Ronan’s throat and his fingers scratching into Ronan’s face, and he saw Ronan, impassive and bleeding in his grasp.

He couldn’t remember anymore where the image from the tree ended and his own subconscious began, but he decided to keep it locked up tight.

There was no telling that what he’d seen in the tree was really a glimpse into the future, that it even _meant_ anything, that it wasn’t just a manifestation of his worst fears and insecurities laid out in front of him: his own hands, inflicting damage on the people he was supposed to care about most, the only people he thought might care about him in return.

And even if it _was_ meant to be the future, it was a future that couldn't happen for about a million reasons, not the least of which was this: he could still feel it, now, feel his fingernails scraping deep into Ronan’s neck, digging in cruelly above his collarbones while Ronan just stared pityingly back at him, and all of it felt so profoundly real and _wrong_ it left him dizzy.

So he listened to the others' banter and he watched the way Ronan managed to make picking off a scab look like a matter of great principle rather than the gross habit it really was, and he forced down the rising panic and preemptive guilt and he assured himself of just the one thing: when it came down to it, there was no reality in which anything he’d seen would play any kind of part in any of their futures. Adam would make sure of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahhh you are welcome to come [motivate me](http://qvnseys.tumblr.com)


End file.
